So Long at the Fair (Antony Darnborough, Terence Fisher, 1950)

Jean Simmons and Dirk Bogarde in So Long at the Fair

Cast: Jean Simmons, Dirk Bogarde, David Tomlinson, Honor Blackman, Felix Aylmer, Cathleen Nesbitt, Betty Warren, Marcel Poncin, Austin Trevor, André Morell, Zena Marshall, Eugene Deckers. Screenplay: Hugh Mills, Anthony Thorne, based on a novel by Thorne. Cinematography: Reginald H. Wyer. Art direction: Cedric Dawe, George Provis. Film editing: Gordon Hales. Music: Benjamin Frankel. 

They might have called it The Gentleman Vanishes. Jean Simmons and David Tomlinson play Vicky and Johnny Barton, sister and brother, whose travels around Europe take them to Paris for the 1889 Paris Exposition, the event that saw the opening of the Eiffel Tower. After seeing a bit of the city on their first night there, Vicky retires to her hotel room while Johnny, feeling tired, stays downstairs to have a nightcap. In the morning, Johnny has vanished. Not only that, the room where he was staying has vanished too. The hotel staff denies that he was ever there, and moreover asserts that the room where he was staying, No. 19, has never existed: The only room 19 is a bathroom. The manager of the hotel, Mme. Hervé (Cathleen Nesbitt), whom we saw check the Bartons in the night before, insists that only Vicky checked in and shows her the registry that only she signed. And so begins Vicky's harrowing attempt not only to find her brother but also to prove that she's not insane. So Long at the Fair is a mostly engaging variation on the gaslighting theme that evokes the similar, though less complex, disappearance of Miss Froy in Alfred Hitchcock's 1938 The Lady Vanishes, though it's not in the same league as Hitchcock's classic. This version is a little too complicated for its own good: It's hard to ignore the many implausibilities of the scheme that's revealed at the end, and the accidental death of a witness who might have prematurely exposed the scheme feels like a contrivance to keep the plot going. But there's still enough fun in trying to figure things out, and the performances are good. Simmons gives full expression to both Vicky's bewilderment and her determination as she deals with uncomprehending authorities, and Dirk Bogarde is handsomely dashing as the expatriate artist who comes to her aid. 

Black Narcissus (Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, 1947)

Cast: Deborah Kerr, David Farrar, Kathleen Byron, Flora Robson, Sabu, Jean Simmons, May Hallatt, Jenny Laird, Judith Furse, Esmond Knight, Eddie Whaley Jr. Screenplay: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, based on a novel by Rumer Godden. Cinematography: Jack Cardiff. Production design: Alfred Junge. Film editing: Reginald Mills. Music: Brian Easdale.

This much-loved film has so far escaped condemnation for its "orientalism," the brown-face performances of Jean Simmons, May Hallatt, and Esmond Knight, and its treatment in general of the Indian characters as mysterious and alien. And perhaps it's better to concentrate on the erotic instead of the exotic in Black Narcissus, to enjoy its stunning, Oscar-winning cinematography and production design. Who can forget the vertiginous moments at the precipice where the bell was rung -- even though those moments were sheer camera-trickery, accomplished in the Pinewood Studios with matte paintings? Or the erotic charge every time David Farrar walks shirtless among the nuns and Kathleen Byron gives him the eye?

Great Expectations (David Lean, 1946)

Great Expectations (David Lean, 1946)

Cast: John Mills, Valerie Hobson, Jean Simmons, Martita Hunt, Finlay Currie, Alec Guinness, Bernard Miles, Francis L. Sullivan. Screenplay: David Lean, Ronald Neame, Anthony Havelock-Allan, Kay Walsh, Cecil McGivern. Cinematography: Guy Green. Production design: John Bryan. Film editing: Jack Harris. Music: Walter Goehr.

Angel Face (Otto Preminger, 1953)

Robert Mitchum and Jean Simmons in Angel Face

Frank Jessup: Robert Mitchum
Diane Tremayne: Jean Simmons
Mary Wilton: Mona Freeman
Charles Tremayne: Herbert Marshall
Fred Barrett: Leon Ames
Catherine Tremayne: Barbara O'Neil

Director: Otto Preminger
Screenplay: Frank S. Nugent, Oscar Millard
Based on a story by Chester Erskine
Cinematography: Harry Stradling Sr.
Music: Dimitri Tiomkin

Otto Preminger was about to take on the Production Code when he made Angel Face: His next film was The Moon Is Blue (1953), a rather tepid little romantic comedy that offended the Code enforcers because its heroine, though relentlessly virginal, demonstrated an awareness of and interest in extramarital sex that was one of the Code's taboos. With the backing of United Artists, Preminger went ahead and made the film, releasing it without the Code's imprimatur. The result was a succès de scandale, a hit far beyond any actual merits of the film, after it was condemned by the Catholic Legion of Decency and by some local censorship boards. Two years later, Preminger and United Artists would follow the same procedure with The Man With the Golden Arm (1952), a film about drug addiction that also flouted some of the Code's prohibitions. Preminger's stand is usually cited among the landmarks leading to the end of film industry censorship. I mention all this because I was struck by how Preminger also ignores the Code's conventional morality in Angel Face, which makes it clear that Frank Jessup has been sleeping with his girlfriend, Mary Wilton -- among other things, he reveals that he knows what she wears to bed, and when he goes to see her, she's in her slip getting ready to go out and doesn't bother coyly pulling on the usual bathrobe. The thing is, Mary is the film's "nice girl," the character meant to be the foil to the film's murderous Diane Tremayne. But Diane doesn't smoke or drink, and Mary does. Some of the reason for Preminger's blurring of the lines between the usual Hollywood ideas of good and bad in these characters probably stems from a desire to build suspense, keeping us from being entirely sure that Diane is the one who turned on the gas in her stepmother's room or if she really is guilty of the murder for which she stands trial. But I suspect that it has more to do with Preminger's desire to pull his characters out of the usual pigeonholes of Hollywood melodrama, to make them plausible, enigmatic human beings. To some extent he's fighting the script, adapted by Frank S. Nugent and Oscar Millard (with some uncredited help by Ben Hecht) from a story by Chester Erskine, which on the face of it is the usual stuff about a conniving woman who loves her daddy too much and who stands to gain from her stepmother's death, ensnaring an unsuspecting man along the way. Mitchum's sleepy-eyed raffishness could have been used to make him the usual tough-guy collaborator of a femme fatale, like Fred MacMurray's Walter Neff in Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944) or John Garfield's Frank Chambers in The Postman Always Rings Twice (Tay Garnett, 1946), but it's not a knock on those two great noirs to say that Preminger does something more subtle with Mitchum's Frank Jessup: He's an accomplice and a victim only by accident, letting his hormones put him in harm's (i.e., Mary's) way, and struggling ineffectually, even a little tragically, not to be dragged down by her. Angel Face is not as well-known as those other films, but with its solid performances, its effective and unobtrusive score by Dimitri Tiomkin, and its knockout of an ending, it deserves to be.