THE Eric Ambler novel has been employed rather lightly and playfully by Warner Brothers in “The Mask of Dimitrios” as a playground to exhibit the not-too-related virtuosities of its adventure-story crew of talented male actors, some of whom have been seen doing the same generally evil things about four times a year for quite a while now. The crew in this picture consists of Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Edward Ciannelli, Victor Francen and some half-dozen others who are good at making the kind of faces that go with these pictures: cruelty (of the cold, immobile-faced variety), fear (as though the person were taken with cold chills), or a double-take job the others are picking up from Lorre, where the actor’s face changes rapidly from laughter, love or a security that he doesn’t really feel to a face more sincerely menacing, fearful or deadpan. Among the people in these films are also a number of spectacular pop-eyes, weak chins and hard-as-nail voices to cringe in front of or glower behind revolvers. Many of their set attitudes, like the cat-and-mouse antics between Lorre and Greenstreet, which were originally supposed to express fear, horror, etc., are now played slapstick fashion for laughs.
These actors produce some light, whimsical effects which are generally minor as far as making the plot any more significant, but they are the most intriguing parts of the film and were generally intended to be by the director, Jean Negulesco. Lorre’s performance, on the side of the law for once, has a nice tone of humor and distress; Victor Francen does some fancifully fruity things with his voice as a syrupy homosexual spy chief, Kurt Katch injects some funny touches of insinuating eagerness as a Turk named Colonel Haki, a bit player makes the most of another small part as an archives clerk who is a bear for organization. Steve Geray does his usual good job as a meek, frightened-voiced little man who is victimized by the corrupt hero.
Most of these show-off flourishes of acting have about the same effect on the picture as some diverting curlicues of penmanship do on a sluggish, uninspired letter. The story shows the career of a super Turkish scoundrel named Dimitrios Makropoulos (and acted tepidly by Zachary Scott) as it is told in flashback episodes by some of his victims to Peter Lorre—playing a detective-story author who is going to a lot of trouble to find material for a book, and to Sydney Greenstreet—a crook who unaccountably is going to even more to get information he already has so that he can blackmail Dimitrios. For several reasons, Dimitrios and his career are the flattest thing in the picture, psychologically the shallowest, and as dull in an evil way as Irene Dunne’s career is in a sweet way in “The White Cliffs of Dover.” The flashbacks concerning him are rigorously stunted in order to wring something funny out of the preliminary chats that occur among Lorre, Greenstreet and the people Lorre interviews. His crimes, which are black enough, are brief and dull as movie events. The actor himself looks more like the third violinist in the Philharmonic—or the male lead in an operetta—and about as threatening. The Balkan atmosphere that surrounds him is just as uninspired and is produced mainly by a raucous, smoke-filled dive which is used three times in the film and features either a squirming Oriental dancer, a Gypsy violinist, or neither, depending on which country’s backwater it happens to be in at the time. The people run to dark hair, oily natures and mustaches.
The British film called “Forty-eight Hours” is about an imaginary Battle of Bramley End, in which a troop of disguised German parachutists capture a British village two days before the main invasion of Britain, and are defeated a day later by the villagers. It was made more than a year ago and fulfilled a good intent to show Britishers what to be on guard against in pre-invasion tactics and what to do and not to do during them. It is far less flashy than “The Mask of Dimitrios” in its non-use of artificial coloring and excitement, and a dozen times more acute in its perception of people, manners and environments. I still feel it has a dullish, weak-tea quality, the result of making the entire engagement too neat and placid, and the progression of its events too restricted, simple and orderly. There are parts of it less prettily visualized: among them the touching, very realistic reactions of three village women when each kills a German or sees one killed, and a portrait of a tweedy, gay-as-a-lark English biddy, who sings songs about parrot pie, and cherry-ripe, cherry-ripe.
July 10, 1944