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The Sunset Blvd. affair from another angle, contemplated by the "champion of the hopeless cause" mainly as a divertissement during a convalescence. Back home after "a teeny-weeny heart attack," the ace barrister (Charles Laughton) combats his nurse (Elsa Lanchester) with cigars in his cane and gin in his Thermos. "Some dark night when her back is turned, I'll snatch her thermometer and plunge it between her shoulder blades." The murder at hand involves the amiably feckless American inventor (Tyrone Power), who stands to gain a fortune from the death of a widow (Norma Varden). Law's gaze is a glaring monocle, the Yank doesn't flinch but his Teutonic wife (Marlene Dietrich) pulls the curtains, their meeting in the Hamburg rubble compresses A Foreign Affair into a punchy ten-minute playlet. A reliable alibi is hard coming from an icy frau, "a drowning man clutching at a razor blade" sums up the relationship. Agatha Christie's London, feints and impersonations and actors playing actors, a heavy hoke thoroughly enjoyed by Billy Wilder. Bewigged opponents in the Old Bailey arena, a tug of war between "learned friends" for the audience in the balcony. The elderly maid (Una O'Connor) has it in for the defendant, vexed by an invention described in Dalinian terms ("You threw an eggbeater into the wheels of her Victorian household"). Hitchcock is brought to an even keel, The Paradine Case and Stage Fright are absorbed into the screen's rigorous associations and dissociations. "A little too neat, too tidy, and altogether too symmetrical," thus the climactic jangling of form, a question of killing versus execution. Huston runs with the matter of artifice in The List of Adrian Messenger, while Wilder pursues his investigative side to the culmination of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Cinematography by Russell Harlan. With John Williams, Henry Daniell, Torin Thatcher, Ian Wolfe, Francis Compton, and Ruta Lee. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |