Noir by Gaslight

The earliest film in the series, Ladies in Retirement (1941), is based on a Broadway hit. Noir legend Ida Lupino took the lead role of Ellen, which had been played on stage by Flora Robson, who was forty; the character was supposed to be sixty. Lupino was just twenty-three, and Columbia head Harry Cohn told director Charles Vidor, in so many words, “You are out of your mind.” Yet Lupino’s performance transcends any worries about age. Ellen has two older sisters (Elsa Lanchester and Edith Barrett) who have just enough erratic behavior from mental illness to make them almost unbearable to anyone who doesn’t love them like Ellen does. Ellen’s dilemma, still relevant in the no-safety-net U.S., corners her into murder. Her crime, in true noir fashion, puts Ellen at the mercy of someone far worse than she is—her unscrupulous nephew Albert, played with oily flair by Lupino’s then-husband Louis Hayward.

In historical terms, it’s hard to pinpoint what set off this cycle of films, which were just called “period mysteries” at the time by critics like Bosley Crowther. The trend lasted only a few glorious years, but Hangover Square was expressly designed to capitalize on it. When the book rights landed at Twentieth Century-Fox in 1945, the studio and screenwriter Barré Lyndon looked at the success of The Lodger just the year before, and transferred Hamilton’s dissolute prewar milieu to Edwardian London, with the same director, John Brahm, and virtually the same cast. (Brahm’s The Lodger stayed closer to the marvelous novel of Marie Belloc Lowndes, which Hitchcock had successfully filmed as a silent. In Lowndes’s novel as well as in the Brahm version, unlike Hitch’s twist on the material, Laird Cregar’s title character is in fact Jack the Ripper. That movie made the most of Fox’s backlot version of sinister London alleyways.)

Robert Siodmak gave the trend a permanent classic with The Suspect (1944), a simply and elegantly constructed story of middle-class Philip Marshall (Charles Laughton, in one of his own favorite performances), whose hopeless marriage to a cold, spiteful woman (Rosamund Ivan) drives him to murder. Like later gaslight noirs, The Suspect derived the outline of its plot from a notorious British murder case, that of Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen. The hapless homeopath was tried and executed for murdering his wife for love of a younger (and, it is said, kinder) woman. In The Suspect’s view of the case, the crime occurs not in cold blood but in a burst of fury, when Marshall can’t take another minute of his wife’s verbal and emotional abuse. And from there, it all goes terribly wrong, worse even than it did for lovelorn Dr. Crippen. “I like people, and I’ve never wanted to hurt them,” says Marshall, in a line as fatalistic and defeated as any in noir.

A little later, Moss Rose (1947) gave a spirited chorus girl (Peggy Cummins, of later Gun Crazy fame) the chance to solve a notorious Victorian cold case, the murder of Harriet Buswell. In addition to handing Belle (Cummins) the detective role and letting her go undercover amid a family as sinister as many gangs, it also gives Belle another traditionally male perk: the narration. Moss Rose is based on a novel by Joseph Shearing, one of many pen names used by the multi-monikered Gabrielle Margaret Vere Campbell Long. Shearing also wrote the novels that became So Evil My Love and Blanche Fury, and both of those, like Moss Rose, were inspired by real cases. (The writers of the early twentieth century went back again and again to Victorian crimes, just as later crime writers found endless plot ideas among the serial killers of the 1970s.)

But let it not be said that women’s capacity for evil goes undocumented in the 1940s. The gorgeous Technicolor Blanche Fury (1948) concerns a lovely but predatory governess (Valerie Hobson) who’s had enough of standing outside the wealthy world that employs her. And then there’s Ivy from 1947, starring Joan Fontaine in one of her best and least-discussed performances, and directed with uncharacteristic verve by Sam Wood. Though Wood has never been known as a great visual stylist, he had the considerable help of famed production designer William Cameron Menzies as producer, as well as Russell Metty as cinematographer. The result, which Eddie Muller himself has called “stone-cold noir,” is a deliciously stylish tale of a poison-wielding femme fatale—one with good taste and manners to go with her sociopathy. The gradual unraveling of Ivy’s best-laid plans is impeccably noir, as is her futile social climbing.

Once again, the screenplay’s basis was a novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes, The Story of Ivy, which book can be read as a spin on one of the nineteenth century’s most infamous murder trials—that of Madeleine Smith. Of course, there are multiple differences between Lowndes and reality, the biggest one being that Ivy is guilty, and Madeleine Smith was released after the uniquely Scottish verdict of “not proven” (usually translated as “you’re not guilty, but don’t do it again”). To this day, some gentle souls insist that Madeleine did not in fact poison her lover after he became very, very inconvenient.

She’s been compared with Lizzie Borden, but in terms of MO, Madeleine was a far subtler creature. Unmarried Madeleine was also doing the unthinkable in 1857 Glasgow: she was sleeping with a man, Emile L’Angelier. And L’Angelier had been blackmailing Madeleine, threatening to expose their affair just as she was about to marry a rich merchant. Soon after L’Angelier took this ill-advised course of action, Madeleine was spotted buying arsenic at the chemist’s. For “her complexion,” she explained. Meanwhile, she stuck to her affectionate routine of making hot chocolate for her lover on many a cold Scottish night. And not long after Madeleine’s skin-care purchase, L’Angelier got sick. Extremely sick. Then he was dead. The lingering ambiguities of this case are what gives Madeleine, David Lean’s 1950 version of the case, its seductive power.

Lean understood what the role needed when he cast his then-wife Ann Todd in 1950 for his version of Madeleine, though Todd was the fairest of blondes, and the real Madeleine (who lived until 1928) had been dark-eyed and dark-haired. But Todd, with her mix of beauty and glacial calculation, turned out to be an excellent choice. Lean’s direction uses the fact that Madeleine occupied the basement floor of her rich father’s house to create shot after shot through bars and windows, visual flourishes as classically noir as anything in the canon. In the end, the director famously hated the film, but seen all these years later, Madeleine looks subtle and seductive, with one of the most enigmatic heroines in noir of any kind.

Ann Todd’s other entry in this series is one of its finest: So Evil My Love (1948), directed by Lewis Allen from a screenplay based on (you’ll never guess) a novel by Joseph Shearing. The DP for So Evil was Max Greene (the professional name of Mutz Greenbaum), who also lensed one of the greatest of all canonical noirs, Night and the City. Todd is Olivia, a missionary’s widow who returns to England after years spent in Jamaica, hating every minute of her life there. On the voyage back to London, Olivia encounters and falls hard for a painter—or so he describes himself—whose evil tendencies are obvious from the start. If noir depends on a law-abiding protagonist being led astray, this film certainly qualifies.

Mark, quite the criminal though not much of a painter, is played by Ray Milland, who bears out my old theory that the best villains are often played by someone who’s also adept at high comedy. Charming, slithery, Mark talks Olivia into a scheme to take advantage of Olivia’s old school chum, Susan. Like the others, So Evil My Love takes part of its plot from a real-life case, one of the saddest and most mysterious ones in Victorian annals, but to name it would spoil the unfolding of a marvelously twisty, and twisted, plot. Putting aside whatever case I’ve made (or not made) for the existence of this splendid little subgenre, So Evil My Love should not be missed.