Jealousy

Jane Randolph has been driving a cab for two years because her husband, Nils Asther, has been unable to work. In Europe he was a famous author, but since he was driven from home, he has become an alcoholic. When Miss Randolph drives Doctor John Loder, they talk about Brahms. When they meet again at a restaurant, Asther is verbally abusing his wife, and they fall in love. This shocks Karen Morley, who is Loder's assistant and has been in love with him for years.

At first this might seem a film noir, but I thought it was much more European, like Visconti's OSSESSIONE or a movie by Molander: tragic poetic realism. The director, Gustav Machatý, had been an important director in Hungary in the late 1920s and early 1930s. His movie EKSTASE had brought him to Hollywood's attention with its nude shots of a young Hedy Lamar. Five years later, both were working in Hollywood, but while Lamar was a top MGM star, Machatý was in the background, running photographic collages. He only directed three credited movies in Hollywood in seven years, and Asther's character seems more a mocking self-portrait of the director than an invented character. Machatý returned to Europe and directed one more movie.

Visually it shows a good deal of visual flair, although the process shots are obviously faked. Most of the actors are solid, but Miss Randolph's line readings are weak. I suspect that even after most of a decade in Hollywood, Machatý's direction was not up to the task. This failure of the central player makes what might have been a great movie merely very interesting... but that is still quite good.

I watched this one because it was from the director of EXTASY. Well, this is not an unteresting feature but a bit boring though not that predictable. Acting is OK, convincing enough to keep your attention and you also have a satisfactory ending, not foreseeable compared to the Hollywood standard. Bittersweet ending actually. Surprisingly good camera work too.

Despite such clichéd dialogue as: "...Something has come between us. What is it?" "You wouldn't dare!" "Oh wouldn't I!" and "I feel a strange foreboding," the film does manage to transcend it's pulpy romantic triangle plot.

This is achieved mostly through a European influenced, "downbeat" atmosphere at odds with the conventionally optimistic American take on life, (this is light years from "It's a Wonderful Life," though both films deal with masculine bread-winner failure).

Indeed, the film seems to have considerable sympathy for Nils Asther's ex-patriate European writer who, disaffected by his new environs, can't make the grade once in the states, and turns to drink and self pity.

But it is through mood rather than scripting that the film earns it's keep, specifically some effective, (if occasionally heavy handed)stylistic flourishes. Thus we have an abundance of tilted camera angles, great looming shadows of creeping figures on the walls at night, dead sea gulls, repeated musical motifs--Brahms etc, (the film bears some stylistic traits in common with with "Strange Illusion")etc.

Most interesting of all is the re-appearance of the same living room setting previously used in "Strange Illusion," "Fog Island" and "I Accuse My Parents." Here slightly re-dressed and reconfigured, it serves as the drawing room of John Loder's character. All of which is doubly odd, since this film is a Republic production, and makes one wonder why they were sharing sound stages and settings with rival PRC.

Jealousy from 1945 stars John Loder (Hedy Lamar's husband), Jane Randolph, Karen Morley, and Nils Asther, directed by Gustav Machaty, and written by Dalton Trumbo.

Randolph is Janet Urban, married to Peter Urban (Asther). She drives a cab to support them - Peter is a bitter alcoholic writer who lost everything in his own country during the war. He hasn't had anything published lately.

Janet picks up a fare, Dr. David Brent, and they become friends. He falls in love with her to the distress of his medical partner, Monica (Morley), secretly in love with him for years.

Peter realizes he is losing the unhappy Janet and becomes threatening. Then he is found dead from an apparent suicide.

No surprises here - the denouement was easy to figure out. Asther, a silent screen star paired with fellow Swede Greta Garbo, had seen better days by this point. However, he is quite menacing and gives the best performance.

Historian William K. Everson thought highly of this film, calling it strange and offbeat. Most likely his affection was a pity vote, given that several people connected with the film were victims of the Communist witch hunts. It's not very well done.

Even by the bottom-shelf standards of postwar Poverty Row crime programmers (it's a Republic release), Jealousy appears primitive. Its sets look ugly and thrown together, its meandering plot line needs plenty more back-story, and its acting is more often awkward than not. But slowly – maybe by dint of its very cheesiness – the movie starts to work on you. It's the work, both as writer and director, of Gustav Machaty, whose most notorious film was the 1933 Extase, where Hedy Lamarr swam in the nude. But that notoriety notwithstanding, Machaty didn't make much of a mark in America; before Jealousy, he hadn't directed a movie since 1939, and afterward would wait another decade before his last film, made in Europe.

To get a bead on where Jealousy is heading takes a while. We first encounter Jane Randolph wearing a visored cap and driving a hack in Los Angeles. One of her fares is debonair doctor John Loder, who takes a very English fancy to her. But she's supporting depressive Nils Asther, a displaced person from the shambles of Eastern Europe who was a noted novelist in his native tongue; in America, he's unemployable. He pawns his cigarette case to buy a gun and end it all. Randolph stops him, which proves to be a mistake.

When Asther grows more jealous and abusive, Randolph warms to Loder and becomes chummy with his devoted colleague Karen Morley. (They lunch together, go shopping together, confide in one another.) But out of false pride Asther, who nurses his unhappiness like a sore tooth, spurns a job as translator at a movie studio, an opportunity arranged by his best friend Hugo Haas (yes, that Hugo Haas, another Poverty Row auteur of vanity pictures). Asther gives the restless Randolph an ultimatum: If she leaves him, he'll use the gun, but not on himself. But that damn gun sure gets around....

Jealousy boils down to a romantic trapezoid. Even at an economical 71 minutes, it moves slowly. But move it does, with an occasional nice touch along the way (a Christmas ornament dropped back into its box after a grim marital spat, a wide-eyed Siamese cat taking in a climactic scene). And as it turns out, it's just a little bit better than it seems.