Beijo da Traição

Thank you Turner Classic Movies and Robert Osborne for introducing us to this excellent specimen of film noir. What is obvious to John Garfield fans is his passion and energy that he pours into his characters. Along with his performance, Maureen O'Hara is in an unusual role as the mysterious girl friend. A thriller!

I've always enjoyed Garfield's work; he's honest, tough and unpredictable. This WWII drama has its own propaganda agenda and dependable Walter Slezak is a creepy Nazi. Audiences of 1943 would find it easy to cheer and boo in the right places, but only for a while. For the mystery to work there has to be some surprises. Lovely and curvaceous Maureen O'Hara is so sweetly sympathetic but also duplicitous, her true motivations are as hard to guess as her stunning appearance is easy to admire.

As far as a stand alone film it is a tad dated because it was a product of it's time and agenda. This was not meant to be escapism; it was a message of how dark the opposition was and how they stooped low to break our spirit. But we know in the end the good guys will win and their pride, their spirit and their cause must lose.

So in retrospect I give it a soft recommendation unless you can put yourself in the mind-set that was made for a specific audience, the mothers, fathers, wives, girlfriends', and children of those fighting the biggest war in history.

"The Fallen Sparrow" is a 1943 film starring John Garfield, Maureen O'Hara, Walter Slezak, and Patricia Morison. Directed by Richard Wallace, from the novel by Dorothy Hughes, the story concerns John McKitrick, a Spanish Civil War vet who escaped from a prison camp, where he was tortured. He's suffering from severe post-traumatic stress, but he has returned to New York to find out who killed his best friend. He has something he brought back with him from Spain, and Nazi agents are on his trail for it. McKittrick doesn't know whom he can trust, and that includes the beautiful Toni Donne (O'Hara), the mysterious wheelchair-bound refugee doctor (Walter Slezak), or even an old friend (Martha Driscoll).

Though Garfield is excellent as a former prisoner of war, and his performance is well worth seeing, the plot of "The Fallen Sparrow" is confusing; the film moves slowly and has very little action. The best thing about it is the cast - the stunning O'Hara, the glamorous Patricia Morison, and the sinister Slezak rounding it out.

Reminiscent of "The Maltese Falcon," but Warners didn't score big with this one. Nevertheless, anything John Garfield did during his short career is worth seeing.

The Spanish Civil War was never a popular subject to begin with for Hollywood, but in 1943 two films would come about it. The first was Paramount's big budget For Whom The Bell Tolls and the second made for considerably less was The Fallen Sparrow about a veteran of that conflict's and the quest after him.

Before just membership in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade blacklisted you from all kinds of places after, people returned after the loss of the war by the Republic to the Falangists without any of the problems that John Garfield faces in The Fallen Sparrow. But it seems as though Garfield managed to cop a battle flag from some old European house that is in sympathy with the Nazis. Believe it or not, Adolph Hitler is going through some really unbelievable lengths to get it back.

Maybe if Garfield had some secret chemical formula stashed somewhere I might have gotten the plot of this film. But for the life of me if it weren't for Garfield's strong performance as a veteran who underwent all kinds of sophisticated torture, the film would have been laughable. So while the plot premise was ridiculous, Garfield's performance anticipates by several years other films about brainwashing techniques on prisoners and the readjustment to civilian life which Garfield never quite makes.

In any event back from the Spanish Civil War and before America gets into World War II, Garfield finds himself involved with some strange foreign refugee types as he goes looking for the murderer of a New York City cop and pal of his who arranged his escape from the clutches of the new Falangist government under Francisco Franco. The most sinister of them and he usually is in these films is Walter Slezak.

In her memoirs Maureen O'Hara said that Garfield was a delightful person to work with even though she was far from sympathetic with his politics. She had no hesitation in labeling him a Communist. In point of fact Garfield was a strong New Deal Democrat who in his years growing up poor and later in the Group Theater made some friends who unashamedly were Communists. They called people like him 'fellow travelers' back in those old bad old days.

The Fallen Sparrow would have been a lot better film had it been given a stronger plot premise.

Hollywood fought World War II on many fronts: most obviously, in its documentaries and war dramas; in genre series coopted for the war effort (such as Sherlock Holmes programmers); and in thrillers dedicated to smoking out the Fifth Column at home (The House on Ninety-Second Street). There was also a more complicated, ideologically tinged kind of movie, not simply anti-Nazi but more broadly `anti-Fascist' (and defiantly leftist). Lillian Hellman's Watch on the Rhine was one; The Fallen Sparrow was another.

John Garfield (who else?) survived torture while fighting for the anti-Franco forces in the Spanish Civil War, but it took its toll; he recuperated in a sanitarium in the Southwest. Upon returning to New York – where a war buddy has met death by defenestration from a penthouse party – he finds some of his friends traveling in the same circles as vaguely sinister Europeans and fly-specked aristocrats – Germans, Italians, Spaniards – who take a perverse interest in him. Among them is Maureen O'Hara (in a dark, forties updo), who runs hot and cold when it comes to his advances.

The dense plot of The Fallen Sparrow collapses into a noirish muddle. Multiple heavies purr in a babel of as many stage accents (Hugh Beaumont's Prussian the most amusing of them). Walter Slezak plays a mittel-European professor whose passion seems to be the aesthetics of torture, and whose limp summons up nightmares for Garfield. There are also family crests dating from at least the Borgias (whose speciality was goblets of poisoned wine), a senile old curmudgeon who believes he'll be restored to the throne of France, and a tattered standard Garfield has rescued from Spain, which becomes this film's black bird....

Following all these threads require rapt attention, but who would be willing to devote anything less to the fight against Fascism? The film borrows from such immediate predecessors in the nascent noir cycle as The Maltese Falcon (especially the ending) and The Glass Key. It cooks up plenty of atmosphere but lacks vital clarity. It's not without interest – the attention to the psychological aftermath of torture is a bold and courageous stroke – but with its political passions looking quaint, if not naive, this overheated melodrama leaves a scorched aftertaste.