El guante verde

The famous Hitchcockian McGuffin that everyone is looking for is a medieval jewel encrusted knight's gauntlet said to have belonged to a warrior saint who defeated the Moors in battle back in the day. The fact that the Moors never got to the French Riviera in and around Monte Carlo is of minor importance. It's an object of veneration and worship to the villagers in that small town that saw battle in the southern invasion of France by Alexander Patch's American army in August of 1944.

Paratrooper Glenn Ford landing in that town finds George MacReady stealing the item during battle. MacReady is a creature of mysterious origins who survives on his wits, resources and whatever he can steal at the moment. To the French he's a spy to the Nazis he's a collaborator which is a nifty arrangement I must say. The Nazis as we know were real big on liberating art treasures from their various conquered countries.

But some allied bombs prevent MacReady from stealing The Green Glove and Ford has it and leaves it with a family in an sealed attache case that belonged MacReady.

After the war, flashing forward seven years, things haven't gone well for Ford in civilian life and he goes back to France with some hope to find that valuable Green Glove and hoping that's his meal ticket. But when he gets there, he finds MacReady as well who's hoping Ford can lead him to The Green Glove.

A few murders later, Ford picking up tour guide Geraldine Brooks to share his fugitive status because MacReady has framed Ford for those murders and it's time for Ford to confront MacReady, The Green Glove and what he really wants from life.

The Green Glove is an independent film released through United Artists that was shot entirely on location in France and Monaco. I'm sure it was a good excuse for a vacation for the English speaking thespians of the film, Ford, Brooks, MacReady, and Cedric Hardwicke who plays the village priest and custodian of The Green Glove who prays for its return.

It would have been nice to have some color, I'm sure part of the reason it was done in black and white was budgetary and part was so that World War II newsreel footage could be incorporated. Still you're talking about some beautiful area of the planet that two years later Alfred Hitchcock would show us in To Catch A Thief. Paramount gave Hitch a much bigger budget than Rudolph Mate had for The Green Glove.

It's not a bad film, in fact it has an exciting chase sequence involving Ford eluding MacReady and his men by taking a rugged mountain trail that is euphemistically called the goat path. Hitchcock couldn't have staged it better. But the cheapness of the production values and a somewhat confused story line prevent The Green Glove from gaining any lasting glory.

Was pleasantly surprised by this one. More exciting than I had expected, it holds your interest throughout save for one instance. The normally bland Glenn Ford was effective and compelling as the returning WWII soldier trying to find the valuable icon in question and George Macready was a convincing 'bad guy'.

The instance in question, during which the picture throws out its anchor, wastes about 15 minutes of screen time as Ford and Geraldine Brooks do a 39 Steps-like turn as a pretend-married couple. Donat and Carroll did it better, but in "The Green Glove" it gave a comedic touch to a film which did not need it.

I thought the scenery and the location shots were spectacular, particularly a chase over a goat path high in the mountains. Director Mate was in his oeuvre here as he was an excellent photographer but an average director. But the scenery and several other shots made me wish I could have seen this one on the big screen.

In a small mountain village in France, they are not going to ring the church bells until the return of a relic, the Green Glove. Suddenly the bells start to ring, and when they investigate, they find a dead man, and the relic in its old place. We then drop back a few years....

Oh, why bother? It's a typical Hitchcock plot, with the Green Glove the Maguffin which everyone wants, Glenn Ford and Geraldine Brooks the plucky Americans whom we're supposed to root for, and George Macready the bad guy. True, it's not Hitchcock directing, but it is Charles Bennett doing the writing, which is probably why he lifted the pub scene from THE 39 STEPS. It's not plagiarism when you steal from yourself. It's just lazy.

That's not to say this is a bad movie. Director Rudolph Maté, having spent 28 years being a fine cinematographer, always made his movies visually interesting, and the big pursuit up the mountain that leads into the finish is very impressive. It does go on too long, with a slow start, and Ford doesn't impress me in this role. To be honest, he rarely impresses me in any role, but the audiences of the era seemed to like him, so it's obviously just me. Miss Brooks gives it her all, and Macready is creepy, as he could be.

Plenty of points of interest went into The Green Glove – a seasoned cast, locations in France (Paris, the Midi), a dangerous quest for a fabulous artifact. But not much energy was expended on making them interesting. It's easy to lose track of who wants what and who killed whom in this lackluster thriller, and hard to care.

Good cinematographer turned so-so director Rudoph Maté cast one of his favorite subjects, Glenn Ford, as a soldier caught up in the liberation of France. There Ford captures but loses George Macready (his old adversary from Gilda, which Maté photographed). Of vague nationality and dubious loyalties, Macready was trying to abscond with the story's Maltese Falcon – a priceless gauntlet which has reposed in a village church for centuries. Ford takes custody of it but, injured, leaves it behind with the family who rescued him.

When post-war prosperity stateside doesn't catch up with Ford, he returns to France in hopes of retrieving the gauntlet and with it his fortune. From the moment his feet hit French soil (having apparently been under close surveillance for years), Macready's men start following him around; the police grow interested when one of them is found dead in Ford's hotel room. With the effervescent Geraldine Brooks in tow, he sets out by the Blue Train to the Riviera, dodging both the law and Macready's mob. There's an early scene set high up in the Eiffel Tower, and, for the resolution, Maté keeps his camera high, taking us to the sheer precipices of a goat trail and to the bell tower of the burgled church (wanly anticipating Hitchcock in both North by Northwest and Vertigo).

But the film jumps from one thing to another like those mountain goats leaping from crag to crag (fatally losing its footing in one coy, comic scene at a country inn where Ford and Brooks feign being newlyweds with bridal-night jitters). More crucially, the characters stay blandly generic, with no feel for their quirks or insight into their motives (and Sir Cedric Hardwicke is thrown away as a country priest). The Green Glove of the quest is the real McCoy, unlike the Maltese Falcon, which was a fake; in this case, the paste is worth far more than the diamonds.

I noticed that another reviewer compared this film to "The Maltese Falcon". Well, I would also add to that "The 39 Steps". Yet, although these both are classic films, "The Gauntlet" (also known as "The Green Glove") is far from classic status. While it is reasonably entertaining, it fails to ever rise above mediocrity.

The film begins during WWII. A downed pilot (Glenn Ford) captures a very strange Nazi collaborator (George Macready)--strange because Macready is a multinational and is out for himself and couldn't care less which side wins the war. During this brief meeting with Macready, he learns about some valuable holy relic--some green gauntlet encrusted with jewels. Well, as soon as you can say 'hey,...this reminds me of "Gilda"', Ford loses Macready and the war goes on its merry way.

Several years pass. Ford has been bumming about Europe with no real direction in life. However, he gets the idea someone is following him and he's right--Macready's men are looking for him because they think he has the gauntlet. He doesn't and the gang soon turns out to be very tough--and Ford ends up becoming a wanted man for a murder the gang committed. Along the way, he picks up a lady friend (much like Madeleine Carrol in "The 39 Steps") and they go on a cross country romp leading to where the gauntlet MIGHT be. There, they have some confrontation scene and the film ends.

About the only thing that stood out in this film for me was the structure of the film. It begins at the end and then begins again--showing all the action leading up to the eventual return of the holy relic to the church. Apart from that, it just seemed like a lot of other films all tossed together rather haphazardly. On top of that, Glenn Ford's grouchy guy persona got a bit old. I've seen it many times before and here he just seems like a guy with a toothache. Not a terrible film but one that never quite seemed to work.