The Glass Tomb

The carnival barker Pel Pelham (John Ireland) borrows some money with his friend Tony Lewis (Sidney James). In return, he convinces his friend Rena Maroni (Tonia Bern), who was Tony´s mistress, to stop blackmailing him. Pet wants to promote a side show with her neighbor Henri Sapolio (Eric Pohlmann), who is a starving man. Sapolio and his wife decides to give a party at their apartment and Sapolio glances at a man leaving Rena´s apartment. Later they find that Rena was murdered and the police suspect that one guest is the killer.

"The Glass Tomb", a.k.a. "The Glass Cage", is a mystery film by Hammer that was classified as film-noir in a recently released DVD Box. The storyline and the screenplay are flawed and weak but fortunately the movie is short and watchable. My vote is five.

Title (Brazil): "A Gaiola de Vidro" ("The Glass Cage")

Strange but fun and short film.

John Ireland does a nice job as a carnival barker, Pel Pelham, who organizes specialty acts. His big one is the Starving Artist, where a man Sapolio (Erich Pohlmann) goes on display in a glass box and doesn't eat for 70 days, trying to break a past record.

As he was with the carnival, Pel has many people in his life from that world.

Sapolio, happy for the work, throws a party. During the festivities, a woman upstairs is murdered. She was blackmailing a friend of Pel's, a promoter who is in fact bankrolling the Starving Artist show. Pel visited her and asked her to stop.

Sapolio tells Pel he saw someone go up the stairs but can't remember details. When the killer learns this, Sapolio becomes a target.

Pretty routine, but it had a certain warmth, odd as that may sound. The carnival people seemed like a big family, and Ireland was fond of them. I kind of liked it.

The Glass Tomb (AKA: The Glass Cage) is directed by Montgomery Tully and adapted to screenplay by Richard Landau from the story The Outsiders written by A. E. Martin. It stars John Ireland, Honor Blackman, Geoffrey Keen, Eric Pohlmann, Sid James and Sydney Tafler. Music is by Leonard Salzedo and cinematography by Walter Harvey.

Pel Pelham's carnival is in town and the star attraction is Sapolio, a man prepared to be locked in a glass cage and starve himself for 70 days. But when a couple of murders occur at the carnival, the police become involved and suspicion starts to point its ugly finger.

Part of the Hammer Film Noir series released by VCI Entertainment, The Glass Tomb is an odd little picture that's more a collection of noirish traits and ideas than a fully fledged movie. Running at just under an hour in length, film hinges on the flimsiest of stories but just about gets away with it on account of solid performances and some spiky themes in the piece. In the mix are carnival outcasts, blackmail, murder, carnal desires, gluttony, addiction and a macabre party scene with a body upstairs kept company for some time by the murderer?! These are nicely presided over by Tully and Harvey where shadows are often prominent and a neon light and subway train serve the atmosphere very well. You do wonder what world we live in when people pay to watch a man just not eat? While the murderer is known to us from the first killing, thus there's no mystery aspect to hang your coat on. Though clearly the makers want us to observe how the murderer easily moves about this carnival group undetected and above suspicion.

Not comfortably recommended as a whole, but enough parts of the quilt for the noir fans to appreciate. 6/10

Another film watched for the "House of Hammer" podcast, which I am still around six months behind the release dates with. This is a strange film, both in terms of setting but also, it's the rare film that I want to be longer, so something more could happen.

Pel Pelham (John Ireland) is asked by his friend Tony Lewis (Sid James) to talk to a girl that he's been having an affair with and is now who is threatening blackmail. By co-incidence the woman, Rena (Tonia Bern) lives above Pelham's friend Sapolio (Eric Pohlmann) with whom, Pelham is planning to rerun his "starvation act", a carnival turn where Sapolio is locked in a small glass windowed apartment and is unable to have food for a number of days. Rena agrees to withdraw the blackmail, as it wasn't her idea, however, as Pelham and his friends organise an impromptu party, she is murdered. Suspicion falls on both Pelham and Lewis.

Despite the pretty horrific professional reviews the film has, I didn't think what was there was too bad. Pelham is an interesting character, not quite as personable as you might need to be to run a carnival sideshow, but not so awful as other Hammer leading men we've had recently. The film also has a number of stars I've heard of, Honor Blackman, Sid James, Sydney Tafler - Wikipedia even suggests that Bernard Bresslaw was the 'Cossack', though I wasn't able to confirm that in the viewing. There's also a return for Hammer favourite Eric Pohlmann.

The problem isn't so much with what's there, as what's not there. It's unclear whether the film was cutdown to make the B-Movie hour slot, but there are elements of the story that either happen off screen and are subsequently talked about or just don't happen at all. Some of this is particularly strange as the film doesn't keep the identify of the murderer from us, the audience, so it's not like there is a big reveal at the end.

I quite like the carnival set up, the elements as Pelham gets the show off the ground (though why you'd come to the opening night of this is perhaps up for some debate) I liked the performances and the version available of Youtube actually looks and sounds pretty good. It's just missing the central elements to make this into a thriller I actually cared about.

John Ireland is a carnival barker starting out with a show on his own. It's a "starving man" act, in which Eric Pohlman is put on exhibition; for seventy days, Ireland tells the crowds gathered in front of the big tent, he will not eat. One shilling for adults to see him, six pence for children. It all seems rather foolish and tawdry, but Ireland has a lot of friends, and they get together to throw a party as he moves up in the world. Everyone is having a great time.... until a girl upstairs is murdered. Inspector Liam Redmond asks Ireland to keep his ears open.... but Ireland thinks he knows who did it.

It's an intriguing venue for a murder mystery, and the set-up reminds me of some of Fredric Brown's murder mysteries from the 1950s. However, there's no sense of a separate society among the carney people and the public; the latter may be suckers, but society is viewed as a continuum; Ireland is married to Honor Blackman, and they have a son. Everyone lives in flats, and Redmond thinks it's all perfectly ordinary. It's what you get when you remove the technique from film noir, and place it in an ordinary world: rather disappointing.