Category: Films

Summary Noir Reviews: Between Wall Street and a High Wall

Side Street (1950)
Young postal-worker with no prospects and a pregnant wife makes the mistake of stealing from a crooked lawyer.  A tight and savvy noir from Anthony Mann and DP Joseph Ruttenberg explores the claustrophobic canyons of New York and ends with an ironically appropriate ‘crash’ on Wall Street.  While the noir atmospherics are there, Sydney Boehm’s screenplay lacks tension, and the leads, Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell, fresh from Nicholas Ray’s They Live By Night (1949), fail to impress.  Bravura camera-work and editing in the climactic car chase make the ending exciting, and the signature Mann violence is particularly callous.  James Craig as a savage hood is arresting.


Mystery Street (1950)
An innocent everyman takes flight after he is implicated in the brutal murder of a b-girl.  A noirish police procedural set in Boston is ok only with disappointing work from DP John Alton.  John Sturges directed.  The inimitable Elsa Lanchester is great as a conniving landlady, and Jan Sterling is nicely camp as the b-girl, but she is knocked-off early.  Bruce Bennett as a Harvard forensic scientist is even more wooden than when he played Mildred Pierce’s boring husband!  Rocardo Montalban as the investigating cop is charming but without depth.  The denouement is flat as stale beer.

highwill1946_18h56m57s244

High Wall (1946)
A war vet with a brain tumor that causes blackouts and amnesia is charged with his wife’s murder.  A film noir where cars are integral to the story and to the noir aesthetics: fast cars screeching to nowhere, dark streets, rain on asphalt, roadblocks, escape, entrapment… ‘crashing out’.  Directer Curtis Bernhardt and his DP Paul Vogel in the many scenes with cars in this picture have fashioned indelibly mystic images of the noir car.  An inverted mis-en-scene that contrasts the order and brightness of a mental hospital with the dark and menace of city streets and apartments at night, delivers an interesting dynamic, but the grittiness factor is almost absent.  Leads Robert Taylor and Audrey Totter are not up to standard, but Herbert Marshall as the bad guy is palpably rotten.

Deadline at Dawn (1946): Screwball noir

An Adrian Scott production for RKO, Deadline at Dawn (1946) is a  great ‘screwball’ noir that is a must-see.  A young Susan Hayward is as cute as a button in the lead role of a taxi-dancer who falls for a sailor mixed up in the murder of a b-girl.  The screenplay by Clifford Odets is based on a Cornell Woolrich story, and is as dark as any noir and as left as a Hollywood movie could go at the time.  At the end, a guy who has murdered a female blackmailer and general no-good dame, as the cops lead him away, laments “Imagine, at my age, to have to learn to play a harp”.  Think about it. Subversive yes! It is the only feature directed by Broadway director Harold Clurman, who was moon-lighting in Hollywood at the time, after the break-up of the Group Theater in NY.  DP Nick Musuraca’s chiaroscuro lensing completes the picture.  As Trevor Johnston says in his review for the Time out Film Guide, “it’s made with cockeyed artistry from beginning to end, and shouldn’t be missed”.

The action takes place in a single night in New York, with a signature Woolrich race against time. Much of Odets’s dialogue owes little to Woolrich and is an entertaining mash-up of clever puns that is in the tradition of the romantic screwball comedies of the period. A cavalcade of character actors portrays an ensemble of zany denizens of the New York night; taxi-dancers, b-girls, gangsters, blackmailers, besotted drunks, and cabbies.  But there is a serious underside: the greed, corruption, and passions of the noir city, where a murder seems the only way-out, and where trusting a stranger is seen as foolish even if the guy is in a jam.

There is a lot of left philosophising, as you would expect from an activist team of film-makers.  Academic’s have taken issue with this alleged hijacking of Woolrich’s story.  Mayer and McDonnell in Encyclopedia of Film Noir (2007) complain that “Unfortunately, the  film’s script tries to inject overt social meaning, and Woolrich’s clever plot is pushed aside by Odets’s pretentious dialogue”, and Robert Porfiro in Silver’s and Ward’s Film Noir: A Encyclopedic Reference (1992) concludes “Odet’s patronizing concern for the common people, and even worse, his pseudo-poetic, elliptical dialogue are out of place in the lower-class locales  of the film”.

Porfirio’s political prejudices aside, these haughty criticisms of Odet’s dialogue don’t align with my feelings. Odet’s dialogue is clever and rings true for every character.  The sailor is a small-town boy with solid values and his simple home-spun philosophy of honesty and fairness is totally believable.  Hayward’s taxi-dancer is also from a small town and the necessary cynicism she has acquired in the dark city is genuine – a matter of survival – but she retains her formative values and acts on them despite her city ways.  She is attracted to the young ‘hick’ sailor because he unlike most guys in the big city does not have an angle: what you see is what you get.  Here Odet’s focus is the fundamental noir motif of city vs. country, corruption and immorality vs. sincerity and decency.

A taxi-driver who helps the couple, Gus Hoffman, is played with assurance by Paul Lukas. Gus, an immigrant with a strong accent, is the film’s philosopher and the target of Porfiro’s attack.  He is a man who has seen injustice and suffering, and his words are world-weary and wise.  Such men exist and I have known many: working people educated in the school of life.

You make your own judgment.  This is a conversation between Gus and the Susan Hayward character, June, before they are interrupted by a cop on the beat:

Life in this crazy city unnerves me too,
but I pretend it doesn’t.
Where’s the logic to it?
Where’s the logic?

The storm clouds have passed us.
Over Jersey now.
Statistics tell us we’ll see the stars again.

Golly, the misery that walks around
in this pretty, quiet night.

June.
The logic you’re looking for…
…the logic is that there is no logic.
The horror and terror you feel, my dear,
comes from being alive.
Die and there is no trouble,
live and you struggle.
At your age, I think it’s beautiful
to struggle for the human possibilities…
…not to say I hate the sun
because it don’t light my cigarette.
You’re so young, June, you’re a baby.
Love’s waiting outside
any door you open.
Some people say,
“Love is a superstition.”
Dismiss those people,
those Miss Bartellis, from your mind.
They put poison-bottle labels
on the sweetest facts of life.
You are 23, June.
Believe in love and its possibilities
the way I do at 53.

What’s wrong here?
This man bothering you?

He’s the only man in four years
in New York who hasn’t?

Summary Noir Reviews: Casbah on the Bayou

Pépé le Moko (1937)
Jean Gabin is cool and Mireille Balin is an angel in this fatalistic but not noir classic.  What is subversive is that the lovers are not bourgeois: he is a gangster and she is a kept woman. Only the French could produce a tragedy of such romantic pathos, with the Casbah an exotic labyrinth of  both despair and sanctuary.  So was inaugurated poetic realism.  A film for the soul.

Dark Waters (1944)
A southern thriller of cruelty and  entrapment from Andre de Toth.  This little known bayou gothic challenges Siodmak’s The Spiral Staircase for atmosphere.  Merle Oberon heads a solid cast which includes Thomas Mitchell and Elisha Cook Jr. as bad guys, and Franchot Tone as a small-town doctor who saves the day.  Oberon’s luminous innocence seduces you from the outset.

The Enforcer (1951)
Bogart as an activist DA pursues Murder Inc in a noirish police procedural.  The first time the sinister usage of  ‘contract’ was spoken on the screen.   Bogart sadly just goes through the motions, but the motley crew of contract killers display a truly disturbing pathology.

The Glass Wall (1953)
A great socio-realist sleeper buried by Columbia on release. Director Max Shane and DP Joe Biroc showcase the teeming streets of New York.   While Shane had a hand in the excellent script, his direction could have been tighter.  The protagonist, an Hungarian war refugee played by Vittoria Gassman, jumps ship after his request for entry into the US is rejected.  Scenes of the desperate Gassman amongst the crowds on the streets of NY are documentary, and the central noir motif of individual alienation in the anonymity of the city is dramatically evoked – a cold glass ‘wall’.  Gloria Grahame is beguiling as a young woman on the skids who helps.

Border Incident (1949)
Essential expressionist noir from director Anthony Mann, DP John Alton, and writer John C Higgins, is a savage critique of US agribusiness.  Alton’s imagery is wholly subversive.  Ostensibly a police procedural about the trafficking of illegal farm workers from Mexico for the farms of Southern California, Alton’s rendering of the desert landscape with a haunting natural light elevates the exploitation of the ‘braceros’ to the realm of tragedy, and from tragedy to a damning political indictment.

Out of the Fog (1941): “throw away the books”

Out of the Fog (1941), the screen adaptation by Robert Rossen and Irwin Shaw of Shaw’s play, The Gentle People, written for The Group Theater in New York in 1939, wears it’s lefist heart on it’s sleeve and has dated badly. Anatole Litvak’s direction is workman-like only, and while James Wong Howe’s camera suitably renders a fog-laden set as the Brooklyn wharf-side, it is to little avail.  Not even John Garfield as the cheap protection racketeer and Ida Lupino as the ‘ordinary’ girl to Garlfield’s homme-fatale, can save the enterprise.  Studio hacks so diluted the trenchant play’s down-beat critique of capitalism and anti-fascist intent, that the contrived ending is played for laughs and the heroes come out looking as amoral as their victim.  This moral ambivalence and the dark photography give the movie a noir tendency.

The film has one bright spot in a  Russian sauna when two rocking-chair revolutionaries hatch their plot to kill the racketeer.  George Tobias as a bankrupt store-keeper delivers a riveting background monologue on his fate. The writing brilliantly employs decidedly Jewish humor in a witty critique that runs to the core of the story, and is totally subversive of the melodrama played out in the foreground.

Out of the Fog (1941), the screen adaptation by Robert Rossen and Irwin Shaw of Shaw’s play, The Gentle People, written for The

Group Theater in New York in 1939, wears it’s lefist heart on it’s sleeve and has dated badly.

Anatole Litvak’s direction is workman-like only and while James Wong Howe’s camera suitably renders a fog-laden set as the

Brooklyn wharf-side, it is to little avail. Not even John Garfield as the cheap protection racketeer and Ida Lupino as the

‘ordinary’ girl to Garlfield’s homme-fatale, can save the enterprise.  Studio hacks so diluted the trenchant play’s down-beat

critique of capitalism that the contrived ending is played for laughs and the heroes come out looking as amoral as their

victim. This moral ambivalence and the dark photography give the movie a noir tendency.

The film however has one bright spot when the two rocking chair revolutionaries hatch their plot to kill the racketeer in a

Russian sauna. George Tobias as a bankrupt store-keeper delivers a rivetting background monologue on his fate. The writing is

brilliantly employs decidely Jewish humor in a savage critique runs to the core of the story, and is totally subversive of the

cheap melodrama played out in the foreground.  The scene is featured in the following edited clip.

Subversive Poet: John Alton on the Border

Border Incident (1949) is perhaps the one film of the remarkable late 40s collaboration among cinematographer John Alton, director Anthony Mann, and writer John C. Higgins, where Alton’s imagery is wholly subversive.  Ostensibly a police procedural about the trafficking of illegal farm workers from Mexico for the farms of Southern California, Alton’s rendering of the desert landscape with a haunting natural light elevates the exploitation of the ‘braceros’ to the realm of tragedy, and from tragedy to a damning political indictment.

Morover, the scene where the undercover agent Jack is murdered by the furrowing blades of a tractor, is one of the most horrific in film noir.  As noted in my Dec 2008 post, Noir Citizenship and Anthony Mann’s Border Incident, Professor Jonathan Auerbach observes that the American  immigration agent “gets ground into American soil by the monstrous machinery of US agribusiness… [this is] a purely noir moment of recognition that reveals the terrifying underbelly of the American farm industry itself in its dependence on and ruthless exploitation of Mexican labor”.  Plus ca change plus la meme chose.

I put forward these frames from Border Incident in support.

The Noir Vignette: “Don’t forget – your dead father was a ‘lousy foreigner’”

In The Glass Wall (1953), the protagonist is an Hungarian war refugee,  Peter Kaban (Vittoria Gassman), who jumps ship after his quest for entry into the US is rejected. A stowaway and without sufficient evidence of  his assisting the US war effort by helping a wounded GI, the young man’s deportation is imminent. Kaban’s only chance is to find the GI.  All he knows about the vet is that his name is Tom, that he is from New York, that he plays the plays the clarinet, and that he talked about the wonder of a place called  ‘Times Square’. Kaban’s search has him roaming the teeming streets of Manhattan and visiting venues with jazz bands playing.  These scenes of Kaban amongst the crowds on the streets of NY are documentary, and the central noir motif of individual alienation in the anonymity of the city is dramatically evoked – a cold glass ‘wall’.

But in his jump from the ship Kaban has injured a rib and his search for Tom becomes more desperate as his injury progressively weakens him. After getting help from Maggie (Gloria Grahame), a young woman on the skids, they are separated after he escapes arrest on a crowded subway platform.  By now his photo is plastered on the front page of the evening papers.

Back on the streets he hears jazz from a burlesque dive and enters from back-stage. A show is in progress with a stripper on stage. Kaban is visible at the curtain as he peers at the clarinetist – no luck. His appearance attracts the attention of the rowdy patrons, and the stripper is not amused. She yells to the stage manager: “Throw that bum out. He’s lousing up my act.” Kaban is pitched out the back of the theater and stumbles into the back-seat of an empty cab at a taxi rank.

The scenario is now set for the vignette, which in terms of the plot, has only a single purpose: to inform Kaban of the existence of the UN and its humanitarian charter, and that it is in NY, the ‘glass wall’ of the title. However, the scenario evocatively reinforces the film’s central theme of personal obligation and social responsibility, with such a deep humanity and charm that it leaves an indelible imprint on your memory. The dialog and the acting are pitch perfect.

The stripper Bella Zakoyla, who goes under the stage-name of Tanya, is played by bit player Robin Raymond. Her performance is really impressive.  She is not young, on the cusp of middle-age, and when we first see her on stage, she fills the frame, and the sincerity of her ‘act’ is striking. She has a joyous grace. When she finishes work she enters the same cab still parked back-stage and hails the driver from a news-stand. The cab heads for her apartment and she discovers Kaban asleep next to her. She recognizes him from his photo in an early edition on the front page of the day’s newspaper. She has spunk and jokes with the cab-driver after asking him to detour to a police station on the way to her apartment. At the precint station, she leaves Kaban asleep in the cab and enters the station.  After a while she returns. We have been played by a neat little conceit in the script: she wanted to check if the guy was on the level before taking him home! By this time, Tom the clarinetist, who also saw Kaban’s photo in the newspaper, has confirmed his story with the authorities, and now they  only want to locate Kaban to tell him and process him as displaced person.

The cab arrives at Tanya’s tenement building, where as a single mother she supports her own widowed mother, an Hungarian immigrant, her two young children, and a brother, who is not in regular employment  – he is a huckster for poker sharps.  She puts Kaban in the bed she shares with her two kids while she waits for her mother to serve the supper she has prepared. The old lady is suspicious of  Kaban at first, but is persuaded that he is kosher and needs their help. Then the brother turns up flush with dough he has ‘earned’ that night. It is clear that this boy is a disappointment after being put through school by Tanya.  He blows up when he finds out Tanya is harboring Kaban, and threatens to throw him out. We cut to Kaban anxiously overhearing the argument in the closed bedroom with the kids, who are now awake, intrigued and smiling. He hears about how Tanya intends to go to the UN in the morning. Back in the living room, the argument continues, and ends only after Tanya’s mother slaps her son across the face for a racist outcry.

Tanya goes to the bedroom to rouse Kaban for supper, and finds he has left after leaving a note thanking her for her kindness and saying that he did not want to make trouble for her.  Tanya is mortified not only for him, but for herself – a lonely woman struggling to raise her kids alone. It is all established without a word. Raymond’s acting is that good. Tanya returns to the living room and slaps here brother across the face.  Kaban was –  if only momentarily – not the protagonist but an observer of someone else’s story.

Great writing, great acting, great craft.  This is how Hollywood even in the decline of its golden period could still fashion great cinema from simple human stories without melodrama and without pretense.

The Glass Wall (1953)

Columbia Pictures 82 min
Directed by Maxwell Shane
Screenplay – Ivan Shane, Maxwell Shane, and Ivan Tors
Cinematography by Joseph F. Biroc

Cast:
Vittorio Gassman – Peter Kaban
Gloria Grahame – Maggie Summers
Robin Raymond – Tanya aka Bella Zakoyla
Joe Turkel – Freddie Zakoyla (as Joseph Turkel)
Else Neft – Mrs. Zakoyla

Awards:
Locarno International Film Festival – 1953 – Maxwell Shane for Artistic Achievement

More than the Director: The Noir Writer

Dark Passage (1944) is one of the few Bogart pictures that disappoints.   Bogart goes through the motions of an escaped con on the run in Frisco trying to clear himself of a murder charge.  Bacall looks great, but for a thriller the whole affair is flat. While the screenplay by director Delmer Daves – from a story by David Goodis – relies on too many implausible coincidences, there is a particularly effective scene where Bogart hops a taxi late at night.

Bogart: Head down the hill. I’ll tell you where to go from there.

Cabbie: Mind a little speed?

I like speed.

Nice looking suit you’re wearing.

Thanks, and I don’t feel chatty.

Some fares like to talk.

I don’t.

You always that way?

Yeah, that’s why I don’t have many friends.

You know, it’s funny about friends.

It’s funny you can’t take a hint.

Brother, you never drove a cab. You got no idea how lonely it gets.

What’s lonely about it? You see people.

Sure, you’re right there. You should see the character I had for a fare yesterday. Picked him up at the Ferry Building.Standing on the curb with a big goldfish bowl in his arm, full of water. Two goldfish. Climbs in the back of the cab, sits down and puts the goldfish bowl in his lap. Where do you think he wants to go? To the ocean. Clean from the Ferry Building to the Pacific Ocean. But he doesn’t know that there’s seven hills. Seven steep hills in between. So we start off. Up the first hill, slippity slop, down the hill, slippity slop. Water all over the back seat, the goldfish on the floor. He picks them up, puts them back in the bowl… up we go again, slippity slop, water all over the… You never saw such a wet guy in your life when we got to that ocean. And two tireder goldfish. But I like goldfish. I’m going to get a couple for the room. Dress it up a little bit, it adds class to the joint. Makes it a little homey.

I thought you said you got lonely.

That’s right. I pick people up and take them places, but they don’t talk to me. I see them get out and go in spots, have fun… then I pick up another load coming out… and I hear them telling about all the fun they had. But me, I sit up here all alone, and it gets lonely.

That’s tough. You’re in a bad way.

You said it. Where are we going?

If I tell you, you’ll ask me why I’m going there… and what am I going to do there, and am I gonna have fun.  A guy gets lonely driving a cab,remember?

That’s right, brother. Lonely. And smart.

Smart in what way?

About people. Looking at them. Faces.

What about faces?

It’s funny. From faces I can tell what people think, what they do… sometimes even who they are. You, for instance, you’re a guy with plenty of trouble.

I don’t have a trouble in the world.

Don’t tell me, buddy. I know. She gave you plenty of trouble, that dame. So you slugged her…  Not now, not here, too many cops around. Don’t try to hit me in the back of the head… or I’ll run this crate up into one of those hotel lobbies.

I’ll give you $500.

Don’t give me nothing. Where do you want to go?

You might as well make it the police station.

Don’t be like that. You’re doing all right. You’re doing fine.

If it was easy for you to spot me, it would be easy for others.

That’s where you’re wrong.  Unless you’d be happier back in Quentin.

Sure, that’s why they sent us up there, to keep us happy.

I see what you mean. Let’s go up here and talk. Did you really bump your wife off?

No, I didn’t.

I don’t figure it that way. I figure you slugged her with that ashtray because she made life miserable for you. I know how it is. I live with my sister and her husband. Now, they get along fine. So fine, that one day he threw a bread knife at her. She ducked. That’s the way it goes. Maybe if your wife had ducked… there’d be no trial, no Quentin, no on the lam.

That’s life.

Smoke?

All right.

Light?  What was she like?

She was all right.  Just hated my guts.  For a long time I tried to find out why, then I didn’t care anymore.

I know. Nice, happy, normal home. I almost got roped in a couple of times myself. If you find the right girl, it’s okay.

What’ll I do?

You won’t listen.

I’ll listen. I want ideas.  That’s what I want more than anything else. I didn’t kill her.  Why should I go back to San Quentin for the rest of my life if I didn’t kill her?

I wonder what he could do with your face?

Who?

A friend of mine. Knows his stuff.

How much would he want?

How much you got?

$1,000. That’s all I’ve got.

He’d take $200.

And keep after me from then on.

No, he’s a friend of mine.

What’s your charge?

Nothing. I’ve seen him work.  He’s great.  I wouldn’t know my own mother after he got through with her.

How long would it take?

Maybe a week, if he doesn’t have to touch your nose.  I don’t think he will.  Just a little around the eyes and here and there.  Got a place to stay? We’re right near the place.

A friend.

Dependable?

The only close friend I’ve ever had.

Let’s see, it’s 2:00 a.m. Now. I’ll go up and see the doc and make a date for you for 3:00 a.m.

Nice safe hour.

The Subversive Truth of Noir: The Glass Wall (1953)

I was fed-up I guess

In the still-topical and very off-beat noir, The Glass Wall (1953), about post-war refugees and the nature of true compassion, Gloria Grahame gives a richly delicate performance as a young woman on the skids who helps a desperate asylum-seeker played with obvious sincerity by Vittorio Gassman.  The streets of New York are rendered with a stunning chiaroscuro palette by DP Joseph Biroc. While the direction by Maxwell Shane could have been tighter, he also had a hand in the excellent script.  A gem worth seeking out.

Bodyguard (1948): “I keep meat warm”

A suspended cop is framed for the murder of his former boss after he takes on a job as the bodyguard for a meat-packing heiress.

An RKO programmer of 75 minutes, Bodyguard is an entertaining mystery thriller that harks back to the hard-boiled pulp published in the 20s and 30s by Black Mask magazine.  The writers include a young Robert Altman.  While it never presumes to go beyond its b-origins, as an early feature  from director Richard Fleischer, better known for later b-noirs such as Follow Me Quietly (1949), Armored Car Robbery (1950) and The Narrow Margin (1952), the movie has some nicely conceived scenes that place it above the ordinary.  Solid turns by tough-guy Lawrence Tierney as a framed ex-cop and the cutest girl-next-door Priscilla Lane as his girl, complete the package.

Fast-paced and breezy, and aided by snappy dialog, the picture is all about entertainment. No angst or femme-fatales, just a a good old yarn about the corrupt rich and their criminal machinations.  The mystery is sustained with just the right hints so that when the bad guys are found out you are rewarded with having your half-held suspicions confirmed.  The climax at the meat-packing plant  has some ‘cute’ mis-en-scene involving a hog-saw and and a meat cleaver.  Great fun.

These shots from the movie attest to its visual panache.

The Big Clock (1948): “the wrong people always have money”

The Big Clock opens with the dark silhouette of skyscrapers against a New York night with bordello jazz on the soundtrack. After a pan tensely edging right across the screen, the camera rests on and zooms into the mezzanine level of a modernistic office building with the signage ‘Janoth Publications’. An anxious man in a suit narrowly avoids a security guard as he sneaks into the mechanism of a large clock that dominates the foyer below. His voice-over relates the circumstances of a dire predicament and events flashback to the previous morning.

But this is about as noir as it gets. The guy inside the clock is a suave Ray Milland, a family guy working for a dictatorial publishing tycoon as the editor of Crimeways magazine. His boss is a gargoyle in a suite sporting a Hitler moustache, and with the nervous habit of sliding his flabby forefinger across his bushy upper lip. A man who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing. Charles Laughton occupies the suit and the executive suite in a building of apt fascist modernist lines fashioned by the film’s art director, Hans Drier.

Director John Farrow and DP John Seitz infiltrate this place with smooth and flowing steps that despite their elegance somehow render the whole space rather flat. Office space is sterile at best, and the result is a ponderous unraveling of a story that borders on the tedious. But such spaces can be rendered with atmosphere. Look at how – and this is indeed ironic – the same Dreier and Seitz under the direction of Billy Wilder make an insurance office look interesting in Double Indemnity (1944).

To cut to the chase, Milland is being framed for a murder by murderer Laughton, who doesn’t know the true identity of the guy he is trying to frame. It sounds better than it plays out. The whole scenario is played too lightly and with no atmosphere. The source novel by Kenneth Fearing has lost something in Jonathan Latimer’s screenplay. Though the tycoon’s final misstep as he escapes into his personal elevator is savagely noir.

Thankfully the affair is saved by an uproarious turn from a supporting actress in a part that occupies less than seven minutes of screen time. British-born character actor Elsa Lanchester – Laughton’s wife and Mrs Frakenstein in the camp classic Bride of Frankenstein (1935) – is a zany bohemian painter, who by chance gets tangentially mixed-up with Milland and proceeds to steal the picture – there is a pun here you will recognise if you have seen the movie or watch the clip below. She keeps turning up and closes the movie with a neat scene of comic irony.

This is her story. She first appears in an antique shop where she and a drunken Milland in the company of the tycoon’s girlfriend haggle over a rather grotesque painting.