|
A descending camera on the snowy maquette (a toy car whizzes by on cue) gives a Ruritanian air to the proceedings, just the overture for a darkening holiday. Bandrika, Germany by any other name, a crowded hotel for the playgirl (Margaret Lockwood) to make the acquaintance of the cheeky clarinetist (Michael Redgrave). ("Someone upstairs is playing musical chairs with an elephant.") Aboard the train, a bond with the elderly governess (Dame May Whitty) and blurred vision from a concussion. The musical pest is the heroine's sole believer when the old woman disappears, "never desert a lady in trouble." The machinery has a false bottom but the bullets are real, Alfred Hitchcock could see where Europe was headed. The title refers to a specialty of Il Grande Doppo, smiling illusionist and one of the strangers in the compartment, another is the hatchet-faced impostor in the missing passenger's seat. "A vivid subjective image," says the Czech doctor with everything to hide (Paul Lukas), a warm visage superimposed upon frowning ones. (Huston reworks it in The Maltese Falcon, vide the gunsel waking up in Spade's office.) Freud's name is obscured by the locomotive's whistle, Sherlock Holmes' cap makes an appearance. A matter of British diplomacy, traveling twits (Basil Radford, Naunton Wayne) terrified of undressing maids while obsessing over cricket. (Nothing spells "England on the brink" like the score of the Manchester match.) With war on the horizon, the appeaser in the bunch turns out to be the philandering barrister (Cecil Parker) who doesn't even get to wave the white flag when gunfire begins. The name in the foggy window, the high heels under the nun's habit, the mummified patient, the spy code whistled all the way home. "Quite an eventful journey." Cukor's Gaslight takes up the inquisitive line of thought. With Linden Travers, Mary Clare, Googie Withers, Philip Leaver, Emile Boreo, Sally Stewart, Catherine Lacey, Josephine Wilson, and Selma Vaz Dias. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |