The Great Flamarion (1945)

Posted by Haggai

The evening show of a theatrical variety troupe is interrupted by two gun shots and a scream. A performer in the troupe is arrested for the murder of his wife, although he pleads his innocence. After the audience, the other performers, and the police have cleared out, a man falls from the rafters above the stage and is noticed by the head of the troupe. As he lies bleeding on the stage, he confesses to killing the woman, but he insists that he will be dead before the police arrive. He begins to tell the tale of how he got there to the lone performer who is on stage with him, as the movie fades into the past...

So begins The Great Flamarion, directed by Anthony Mann for Republic Pictures, based on a story by Vicki Baum (most famous for writing an earlier play that had been adapted for the screen as Grand Hotel), and released in January of 1945. The basic storyline--a wily femme appeals to a love-lorn older man, perhaps with dollar signs in her eyes, to bump off her no-good husband--involves several standard noir plot elements. While it isn't likely to make anyone forget about any of the formidable classics from right around that time with very similar plots elements--Double Indemnity, Scarlet Street, The Postman Always Rings Twice, to name a few--this is nevertheless a well-executed movie, with great performances by the leads, and some effective stylistic touches in Mann's direction.



The following summary paragraph is from an article posted on TCM's website for their Mann tribute last month, written by Jeremy Arnold:

Film historian Jeanine Basinger has written that The Great Flamarion "contains the prototype of what would become the Mann hero - a character whose present is shaped by a scar (or secret) from his past." Von Stroheim plays that character, a vaudeville performer whose specialty is a trick gunshot act, and whose "scar" is a failed romance many years earlier which has left him hating women ever since. His gunshot-act assistants, played by Mary Beth Hughes and Dan Duryea, are married, but Hughes seduces von Stroheim into getting rid of her husband only to then betray him, in true femme fatale style. Von Stroheim winds up learning the hard way what it's like to fall for the wrong woman in one of these movies: miserable.

Flamarion's act involves him bursting in on a couple in mid-embrace, played by his assistants Al and Connie Wallace (Duryea and Hughes). Presumably the jilted lover in this triangle, he fires a shot that lights a match in her hand, shoots just past her lover while looking in a mirror, shoots several light bulbs out around the lover, and displays many other impressive feats of marksmanship. Al's incessant drinking leads both Flamarion and Connie to berate him for endangering himself on stage. After assuring Al of her love for him, Connie goes to Flamarion and tells him that she's actually in love with him, not with her husband. Her attempt to explain what she feels every time they go through the act is where the script first delves into that familiar conceit of many a film noir, the equation between guns and sex:

You look at me. Your eyes are so steady, so piercing. You aim and fire, and the bullet cuts through the air. I close my eyes and then I feel the bullet hit the target, and my shoulder strap falls. I tell myself that it was your hand. Every bullet is a caress. Do you see now?

As they continue travelling around the country, Connie angers Flamarion by discovering his old letters to a woman he was once in love with, a past that he's broken from for the past 15 years, concentrating on nothing but his work ever since. Hinting that she might be the woman who can break through his shell, Connie also appeals to Flamarion that her situation is only getting worse: Al is drinking more than ever, and even striking her, because of his jealousy. Unable to resist her charms, Flamarion begins romancing her at their next tour stop. At this point, the flashback skips ahead to introduce a young bicycle act performer, Eddie (played by Steve Barclay), who clearly has something going on with Connie as well. We can tell that he's the Nino Zachetti of this set-up: Connie is laying the groundwork for Flamarion to bump off Al, so that she can turn around and run off with Eddie. Also, Esther Howard shows up, carrying two dogs:


A key scene follows, where Connie and Flamarion discuss their devotion to each other, and she tells him about a dream she's been having, where Al was drunk on stage, and Flamarion just happened to miss while shooting at him. Just in case we might miss the connotation, she describes the scenario while holding one of his guns in a way that suggests...um...well, you get the picture:


Startled by her proposition, Flamarion instead goes to Al and offers to pay him off to quit the act, but leaving Connie to stay on. Al refuses, insisting that "the Wallaces stick together." In a great scene that follows, Al tells Connie about Flamarion's offer, and while she plays along and acts indignant for Al's benefit, her facial expressions show her surprise and pleasure at Flamarion's dedication to her. Finding himself backed into an ever tightening corner, yearning to be with Connie but unable to bribe Al out of the picture, Flamarion tells her that he'll agree to go through with the scenario that she said she dreamed about. Of course, as all noir devotees know, once you go down that road, there's no turning back...

Overall, The Great Flamarion is a serviceably plotted noir, perhaps hampered by some weak dialogue in a few scenes, but strengthened greatly by the performances of von Stroheim and Hughes, as well as Mann's tension-heightening direction of several key moments before violence breaks out. Hughes in particular stands out for me, layering multiple meanings and motivations into her dialogue in many different scenes. Von Stroheim's rangy performance takes him from the imperious martinet of his stage act to the lovesick loser who spends an agonizing series of days in an expensive hotel suite, desperately waiting for a romantic rendezvous that's never going to happen.

One interesting aspect is the striking similarity of the reckoning between the lovestruck older man and the manipulative younger woman in this movie and in Scarlet Street, which was released almost a year later, near the end of 1945. Apparently Lang had been hoping to adapt Renoir's La Chienne for quite some time, according to David Kalat's Kino DVD commentary for Scarlet Street, so any similarities are probably coincidental. Still, consider some of the last lines spoken by each of the two female characters in their final, fateful moments:

Connie Wallace to Flamarion:

Why, you poor sucker. How could anyone love you? That fat, bald neck; those squinty eyes. You're old, you're ugly. Even the touch of you makes me sick. I hated you, and I've always hated you.

Kitty March to Chris Cross in Scarlet Street:

I'm not crying, you fool, I'm laughing! Oh, you idiot, how can a man be so dumb? I've been waiting to laugh in your face ever since I met you. You're old and ugly and I'm sick of you--sick, sick, sick!

A few finals words from the TCM article:

Erich von Stroheim, the famous director of silent pictures, didn't care for non-linear movies and criticized the flashback structure of this film, which he thought was a cheap attempt to make the movie seem "more important." As biographer Arthur Lennig wrote in Stroheim, von Stroheim said, "All my advices were for nothing. The end was the beginning and that was the beginning of the end. Again and again I say that people at large are not interested in a story when they know from the beginning that one of the principal actors is dead."

Von Stroheim and Mann clashed during production of this movie, and Mann later said, "He drove me mad. He was a genius. I'm not a genius, I'm a worker." The Great Flamarion does reveal Anthony Mann beginning to sense how to elevate an ordinary story through expressionistic directing choices.

Good thing von Stroheim didn't take any more roles in films where one of the protagonists is dead from the beginning. For instance, who would want to go see a movie that starts out being narrated by a screenwriter floating face down in a swimming pool that belongs to an aging silent movie star living with her former director? Surely nobody would have remembered von Stroheim's role in something like that!