The Glass Cage (1955)

aka The Glass Tomb

Pel Pelham (John Ireland) is a carnival barker as well as a family man. He genuinely loves his job. Well, mostly, it appears, he loves the feeling of divorcing sucker from money in as flamboyant a fashion as he can come up with. Right now, he’s planning on introducing London to the special talents of starvation artist/starving man Henri Sapolio (Eric Pohlmann) and his attempt to break his own record by going seventy days without food while on public display in the titular glass cage.

Pel still needs a bit of capital for this, though, so it’s a lucky break when old showbiz pal turned successful business man Tony Lewis (Sidney James) asks Pel for a favour worth 250 pound. Tony, you see, is about to be married to a nice young upper class lady, but an old lady friend is blackmailing him for money. Pel might just be the right guy to talk said lady friend out of it. As it turns out, the business is money easily earned, for the blackmailer is Rena Maroni (Tonia Bern), an old friend of Pel’s. Even better, she has changed her mind about the blackmail anyway and won’t do anything that could embarrass Tony. She was clearly talked into the attempt by someone, but doesn’t tell Pel who.

We learn soon enough that the blackmail instigator is the carny biz world’s favourite agent, Harry Stanton (Geoffrey Keen), and Harry’s so unhappy about Rena’s change of heart, he murders her while Pel and his carny pals are having a party just a flight of steps down. This is just the start of an affair that’ll cost a good handful of people their lives. Fortunately, once under pressure, Pel turns out to be quite a good hobby detective, particularly paired with one Inspector Lindley (Liam Redmond), a man who clearly has a heart for the less upper-crust inhabitants of the world.

This sixty minute cheapie directed by Montgomery Tully is one of the quota quickies Hammer produced with Robert Lippert, and it is certainly one of the better examples of its kind. Tully’s filmmaking is straightforward and effective, with some moments of very clever staging and a couple of scenes that reach for the intensity of US noirs, though the film never attempts the expressionist visuals of those films.

In tone, however, The Glass Cage is certainly close to what one would call a noir, not quite as cynical as its American brethren could get, perhaps simply because its extra short running time doesn’t leave quite enough space to really dig into the messed-up minds of its villains, nor into the complicated personality of its protagonist Pel. What’s there of these depths is, however, well-realized, and works well with the film’s stranger plot details. And they do get strange, particular in a finale that’s slightly more bizarre and macabre than one would expect, and so far-fetched, Cornel Woolrich would have been proud to be associated with the film, if only he had been involved.

Despite the film’s briefness, it at least manages to draw its characters well enough to suggest actual personality and depth to them. In part, that’s thanks to the script’s effective use of shorthand characters tropes, in part because of a cast that fits into these tropes so nicely, they provide them with actual life (and liveliness) and make them memorable. I was particularly impressed by Ireland’s ability to draw Pel as a guy who is at once shifty and trustworthy; a man working a semi-crooked business and loving it without being crooked where it matters.

The film clearly has a lot of fun with showing as much of the carnival business as its budget provided, at the outset using it as a companionable counterpoint to the darker business of the main plot until both eventually intersect more directly. One can’t help but notice that it’s the – by 50s standards – morally dubious carnival people who do most of the killer catching work here, and that the film’s protagonist is even a bit of a conman who wouldn’t go unpunished in more typical 50s fare, and nod approvingly.

Paid To Kill (1954)

aka Five Days

American James Nevill (Dane Clark) is the president of British Amalgamated Industries. He's running the company with a certain brutality and a flair for risky gambles that not everyone on the board approves of, but until now things have paid off well for everyone involved. Now, however, Nevill has miscalculated in a business project he thought important enough to not only put the company's money but also his own into, a failure that will cost the company and himself everything. Nevill realizes he has gambled and lost, and decides to cut his losses in a rather radical manner. Nevill's planning to hire his old buddy, the shady Paul Kirby (Paul Carpenter) to kill him. That way, not only will Nevill's beloved wife Andrea (Thea Gregory) be spared the shame of his failure, but she'll also be set for life with the insurance money.

Kirby isn't too willing to murder his old buddy - there's morals and risks to think of, after all - but Nevill has a way to be convincing that involves blackmail for a murder Kirby actually might have committed and a lot of punches to the face.

Once the appointed day for the murder has arrived, though, the man responsible for failure or success of Nevill's business venture changes his mind, suddenly turning Nevill's total loss into an incredible success. Triumphant, Nevill attempts to call Kirby off again, but his would-be killer has seemingly disappeared from the face of the Earth. Worse, somebody is trying to kill the industrialist, and that somebody isn't willing to talk to him at all.

Together with his secretary Joan (Cecile Chevreau) - yes, of course she's in love with her boss for inexplicable reasons - Nevill tries to uncover what's really going on (have three guesses) before he's either murdered or having a mental break-down.

Paid to Kill (for once, I prefer the US title to the British one) is another one of the films the young Hammer Films made in association with US B-movie mogul Robert Lippert. Lippert generally provided money and one or two American actors in search for a pay check for these endeavours but does not seem to have had much influence over the actual production and content of the movies, which is all for the better, seeing as Hammer's filmmakers were generally a lot more artistically successful than the sort of people Lippert tended to associate with.

Now, Paid to Kill's director Montgomery Tully is not exactly the sort of director coming to mind when thinking the phrase "artistically successful". Tully is more the kind of guy you'd connect with something like "dependable workhorse", but as it turns out, he's a dependable workhorse very much capable of making a solid, often quite exciting, Brit noir. While the film's look isn't anything to get excited about, and quite far from the expressionistically influenced shadowplay of the first wave of American noir, Tully is more than capable of using some elements of that style to further his film's mood. It surely can be no accident that the film gets darker and more shadow-heavy the further Nevill's cocksureness - well, and his life - goes down the drain until everything ends in a glass house that's all grey shadows and not much light, even though Tully isn't all that obvious about this neat trick. Clearly, it's something the audience is supposed to be subtly influenced by, and less a technique to impress, to give the film the mood of a nightmare or to be symbolic.

Tully also shows a great sense for pacing, and for the escalation - of action, of melodrama, and of the situation Nevill finds himself in - so important for a thriller like this to work. There's not a single shot wasted on anything not relevant to plot, characters, or mood, everything is tight, well thought-through, and makes sense as long as the film is going on.

Sure, the basic idea of Paul Tabori's script wasn't new even in 1954, and what's actually going on should be clear to the audience much earlier than it is to Nevill, but Tabori's focus is so clearly on showing us Nevill breaking down in subtle and unsubtle ways, seeing him having to confront the lies his self-image is built on, that originality doesn't come into play; it's not so much about surprising the audience than it is about keeping it tense and interested, and interested and tense I was.

I can't end this without at least mentioning the quality of Dane Clark's performance. If you know your noir, you already know Clark as one of the genre actors often getting the short end of the stick when it comes to critical recognition, even though he starred in films like Whiplash and Moonrise. There's a believable intensity to the actor's performance in Paid to Kill, an ever increasing tenseness to his physical acting, and an ability to convey a sense of dread as if he were a character in a horror movie once he finds out on how many false assumptions his life is based on. Clark also manages to make a character who is a bit of a jerk (though a jerk out of thoughtlessness, not out of cruelty) sympathetic enough that old, hard-hearted me actually cared for what happens to him.

 

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In short: The Edgar Wallace Mystery Theatre - The Man Who Was Nobody (1960)

The German Rialto movies were of course not the only Edgar Wallace adaptations made during the 60s. In Wallace's home the UK, Merton Park Studios produced a ton of short b-movies (in the initial sense of the word) between 1960 and 1965, of which The Man Who Was Nobody is an early example.

I have to say, though, that this is hardly playing in the same league as the Rialto movies. Sure, the plot is Wallace-typically overcomplicated, but the British production side-lines the pulp elements and the plain, over-excited weirdness the German Wallace movies loved to play up as much as possible until The Man is only ever another mystery movie without much to excite one.

It sure doesn't help the movie much that its director Montgomery Tully - who always was good at making a perfectly entertaining set-up boring - does not seem to believe in doing even the slightest thing that may be of visual interest to anyone. Though the camera isn't nailed down, it might as well be for all the non-excitement Tully's going for.

The Man isn't a total loss, though, for it thankfully features a very surprising element for a Wallace adaptation - an early 60s hip female private detective as its main hero. Even better, said heroine Marjorie Stedman is played by Hazel Court. Court seems to have quite a bit of fun with her role; she's certainly doing her best making a lot of rather boring and trite scenes of not very exciting adventures in talking to less than exciting people at least look somewhat glamorous and exciting. It's probably not enough to save the film for anyone who doesn't know and admire the actress from Corman's Poe adaptations, but Court fans like me will certainly enjoy seeing her associate with beatniks and be the only actor in the film who actually seems to be alive.

 

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