THE NEW SCHOOL

FILM SERIES TEN: THRILLER

Program 1: Feb. 12 1971

Coming towards the end of director Howard's peak period (1929-35) of really top-flight thrillers, Mary Burns, Fugitive is in some ways one of his best. Admittedly, it's a fairly routine kind of story, and logic is not always a strongpoint; Mary Burns almost deserves her fate for the witless way she conducts herself during her court trial! But the intensity of its limited action sequences, and the style and variety of its camerawork, with its predominantly German angles and lighting, plus the many off-beat characterisations, make it all seem more important than it really is. Certainly it moves well, and is constructed so efficiently that it survives a relatively static climax that could have seemed anti-climactic after such a powerful buildup. As often with Howard (and also Fritz Lang), it is the villains that are the most colorful and interesting characters, and even at times the most sympathetic, thanks to the Gestapo-like tactics followed by the F.B.I. Alan Baxter is particularly good; he was rarely used anywhere near as effectively again, except perhaps by Hitchcock in Saboteur. Sylvia Sidney, as in Street Scene, You and Me, Fury, You Only Live Once and Dead End, is suitably haunted and hunted - but this was, after all, comparatively early in her career and the role had not yet become a cliché with her. Melvyn Douglas, arriving at the half-way mark and remaining a blind-folded invalid for the bulk of the remaining footage, has surely the least taxing role of his career.

1929's Bulldog Drummond was an enormous commercial and artistic success, easily one of that year's best pictures, and, largely by virtue of Ronald Colman's dashing manner and debonair diction, transformed him instantly from a modestly popular silent star to a talkie star of the first magnitude. This follow-up, done in much the same tongue-in-cheek vein, is in some ways even better than its predecessor. As a post-Production Code picture, it has to deny both its villains and its hero the leeway in cheerfully amoral behaviour that they enjoyed in the earlier film. But its full-blooded self satire is more restrained, and wittier, and all the better for it. The plot is actually an offshoot of that famous actual occurrence at the Paris Exposition at the end of the last century that has since provided fodder for many a novel and movie -- both in its original form in So Long at the Fair, and in sundry derivations such as The Lady Vanishes. As such it doesn't follow the standard mystery pattern, and provides some extra surprises as a result. The welding of mystery, menace and light-hearted comedy is superbly smooth, with no one element dominating the other; the pacing is brisk, and the dialogue and performances a delight. Colman became so typed as idealistic Empire-builders (Lost Horizon, Clive of India) that one tends to forget how perfect he was in light froth such as this. Sets, camerawork, art direction, all exude a production gloss and expertise that are a constant pleasure to watch, and above all else, the film is an "entertainment" - a word that it is becoming increasingly hard to apply to contemporary movies, which seem to prefer to regard themselves as "experiences." Which they certainly are, although perhaps not in the way that their promoters intended.

--- William K. Everson ---