A MURDER film made by Monogram for $50,000 (a sum considered as money in terms of modern Hollywood production, but just barely; its filming, which took seven days, is close to as fast as a movie director dares go), called “When Strangers Marry,” is about as human a movie as I have seen this year. Its best scenes, which express some of the solemn melancholia of being troubled and lonely in a strange city, occur in a story that tells the harassing experiences of a young girl trying to find her husband in New York and what happens when she finds him and has to help him hide from a murder charge. It realizes its hostile environment without using a gingerbread house, dark warehouses or somebody’s staircase, and torments its people without starving them or threatening to shoot their kinfolk. The girl and her husband hide out in what seems the kind of desolate apartment building such a couple would get into, the kind that nobody seems to own and in which nobody seems to belong, neat and hard, with a dull, flat, gray light in the rooms where a few heavy pieces of furniture are widely separated. The people do a lot of depressed standing around without saying anything witty, which not only is treating their situation honestly but has a markedly fine effect on the film. Neither of them is considered as exceptional in any way—the girl is as close to small-town innocence as Hollywood gets (even here it is more like finishing-school sensitivity and niceness), and the husband is surprisingly dull, suppressed and frozen. The mood, which is almost the whole picture, even approaches a real sense of alienation.
The movie is as economical as it is human, since its action is on an extremely small scale, with hardly any of the usual suspense mechanisms like hunts, clues or detection. However, it is one of the best mysteries of the year. Aside from the apartment-house scenes it has only a few skit-like moments: at a Share-a-Ride agency (where an unnamed actor turns up one of the few performances of a driver that isn’t composed of a mild little Irishman trying to be tough, Brooklynesque and comic all at the same time); at a Harlem jazz dive, as usual; at a Coney Island mental wizard’s act; and a few brushes with the police. In all of these there is the common movie mistake of seeing all the people and the environment as equally droll, quaint and productive of an “experience.” But even this material seems fresher and less annoying than similar devices used in other films. In fact the whole thing seemed original to me, compared to movies like “Double Indemnity,” “Laura” or “Phantom Lady.” Though it has certain unsuccessful embellishments that are mainly snatched from German expressionism—such as a face moving almost through the camera, a cross-section of a hotel showing the rise of an elevator from bottom to top, or a scary walk through a park underpass with crescendoing footsteps and the girl’s hallucinations dissolving on the walls—it is the least arty of the films mentioned above.
The script is cut down to the bone and a little further, so that it is hard to find any of the villain’s character and little more than goodness in the others. But it only stumbles at the dénouement (an old-fashioned stumble so inevitable you take it for granted). Whoever did the casting tried for actors who look as if they belong to some other profession besides acting and to some other income bracket than high middle class or higher, and they act adequately in addition to being credible (the unprofessional stiffness in the leads adds to the frustrated mood that seems good in the film). Bob Mitchum, a sardonic, cold-faced person, is the most interesting. William Castle’s direction projects the story as an actuality rather than as something being enacted for a camera, director or audience, and he seldom jumbles a sound image and a visual one at the same moment with the same force. His perceptions don’t go as far and are not as original as the early Hitchcock’s, but he has much of Hitchcock’s light, sharp control of story-telling and technique, which is apparent in how much he accomplishes in this movie’s first two or three minutes. That includes the murder, the character of the victim, the motive and the presentation of the problem, plus a degree of terror achieved on almost every shot by irritating sound, cutting or grotesque and surprising image.
“When Strangers Marry” hits just about everything it aims at; as a mystery it puzzled me more than a lot of other movie mysteries have, and altogether it seems to me an intended bunt that scored about a triple.
December 4, 1944