|
The introductory feint is a diving operation off the coast of Florida, tungsten for the trip to the old country. The Yank joined the British commandos during the war, a raid casualty only "the bullet that killed him wasn't German," his brother (Ray Milland) investigates. London and Birmingham, Welsh mines and Scottish Highlands and polite evasiveness always. The officer (Hugh Sinclair) is now a moody aristocrat, his promised (Patricia Roc) pens children's books in between fits of hay fever. Another comrade (Marius Goring) has taken up ballet choreography, the intelligence agent (Naunton Wayne) deals in cars and, for the right price, information. "You see, I don't like being reminded of the war. Untidy business. Too primitive." Jacques Tourneur's saturnine elegance is just the thing for the inquiry at once tranquil and uncanny, a deceptively modest study of shifts and disappearances that points to nothing less than the modernist thrust of L'Avventura. (The English chapter in I Vinti reveals an even closer point of contact with Antonioni.) Enigma of shillings and pence, the bureaucrat's cup of tea that cannot be sipped, Gaelic expressions and recurring melodies. "What are you scared of?" "Everything, dear chap, everything. I jump at my own shadow. A very sad thing." Tomes about Mary, Queen of Scots in the isolated manor, along with a recital for off-key schoolchildren, cf. Hitchcock's Young and Innocent. It builds to a Tourneur coup of armed men dealing with the weight of death and British etiquette, the landscape around them vast and vacant "almost as if everything was waiting." The protagonist goes home with sweet lass and bitter truth. With Marjorie Fielding, Edward Rigby, John Bailey, Colin Gordon, Dora Bryan, Reginald Beckwith, David Hutcheson, and Michael Brennan. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |