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Bergman in Hour of the Wolf evinces a vivid memory of the opening scene, the interminable minute in the gloom. Out of the asylum and into the war, "a quiet life from here on" for the hero (Ray Milland), not quite. There's time for a charity fete before the train to London, a prized cake is all it takes to open up a netherworld of codes and passwords and unreliable fronts. Out of locomotive steam steps the counterfeit blind man whose blank gaze sharpens suddenly and maliciously, the pursuit during an air raid sees a home turned into a crater in seconds. "Mothers of the Free Nations," a spy ring by any other name, Austrian siblings (Marjorie Reynolds, Carl Esmond) run it. "War plays the devil with a business like this." Fritz Lang strips Graham Greene's novel for a matchless flow of bizarrerie, not the author's anguished subjectivity but the director's calm acquaintance with the irrational. The palm-reading hag at the fairgrounds becomes a sultry penthouse spiritualist (Hillary Brooke), a floating visage when the lights go down in one of the story's numerous sinister circles. Bowler-hatted carnival stranger, fashionably late séance guest, busy tailor wielding oversize shears, three incarnations and two deaths for Dan Duryea. "I wasn't mad, you see, but the law called for it." The exploding suitcase yields to a see-sawing POV, truth sounds a lot like insanity by the time Scotland Yard hears it. "Don't help the enemy," advises a poster briefly glimpsed at the tube-station shelter, The Psychoanalysis of Nazidom, a popular first edition. "The strain of necessity" is a traitor's excuse, Lang's presiding image is a single bullet hole to illuminate the darkness. A capital work, studied from start to finish by Franju and subsequently absorbed into Scorsese's Shutter Island. Cinematography by Henry Sharp. With Percy Waram, Alan Napier, Erskine Sanford, Mary Field, and Aminta Dyne. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |