Whispering City

This unusual Quebec production from 1947 presents good acting in a thriller context, but unfortunately goes overboard in the final reels with unbelievable, even silly plot twists designed to keep the pot boiling. That turns a serious effort at an alternative to the dominant Hollywood films into just a B-movie curio.

Mary Anderson, who was featured notably in Hitchcock's ensemble cast thriller "Lifeboat" is strong as the female lead. She's a crime reporter for the Quebec newspaper who digs her teeth into a cold case that ultimately gets her into trouble with the murderer, still on the scene, who got away with that old crime.

She gets romantically involved with a pianist/symphony composer, nicely underplayed by Helmut Dantine and has an adversary, a powerful lawyer played by Paul Lukas. Supporting cast is weak, except for Joy Lafleur, flamboyant as Dantine's ailing wife.

Anderson's serious pursuit of the crime story is well developed, but as the villain manipulates events, the screenplay becomes strained and leads to a ridiculous climax scene. Some serious rewriting could hae saved this movie.

Fyodor Ozep's last movie feels like a Russian novel, with its themes of retribution and conscience. And music. There's a great Romantic concert that plays with the denouement, and if it were more Russian, it would have made my point too clearly for any subtlety. Ozep was a Russian film maker who had left the Soviet Union in the early 1930s, but while in his homeland, he had done startlingly original work, in Germany and France and the United States, he drew his works from the Russian novelists: Tolstoy and Dostoevski and Pushkin.

It all begins when news reporter Mary Anderson is assigned a brief story. Mimi D'Estee had once been a well-regarded actress. However, when her husband was killed in what appeared to be an accident, she retired and has spent the rest of her life saying it had been a murder. Now she has been struck by a car and is in bad condition. Miss Anderson next approaches local philanthropist Paul Lukas, who is busy arranging for Helmut Dantine's premiere of his concerto. Dantine's wife is driving him batty; he can't work. Eventually he leaves and Miss Anderson comes in. Lukas is sympathetic. After she leaves, he calls the hospital and discovers Miss D'Estee has died. He calls his friend, John Pratt, Miss Anderson's editor, and suggests there's no point in raking up ancient scandal. Pratt agrees, but Miss Anderson is going to continue her investigation.

So far, there's nothing to indicate.... well, anything. Nineteen minutes of the movie have passed before Miss Anderson goes to Miss D'Estee's apartment and barely misses Mr. Lukas, who has broken in. Since she will not give up the story, Mr. Lukas will just have to convince Mr. Dantine to kill her.

Ozep has directed the script to his actors' benefit. People -- aside from the increasingly deranged Lukas -- behave the way people behave. Their conversation sound real. The reactions sound real. The nuns gliding by on the street look real -- the movie was shot in Quebec. There are lovely moments, like the paternal manner of John Pratt towards Miss Anderson, the way a florist's delivery boy waits for his tip, Mr. Dantine's embarrassment at the flop house he is staying at, even the way Miss Anderson stares in horror at Mr. Lukas, come to murder her. People always remain people in this movie, even at the most bizarre moments, and Ozep's handling emphasizes that. Moments like those are far more cinematic to me than the most involved Busby Berkeley visual extravaganza and this movie has plenty of them. They do things and we, the audience, infer. That draws us into the story and the characters far more surely than a three minute exposition.

Whispering City's locale is Quebec City, that odd European fortress set high over the St. Lawrence River; it comes to Gallic life more fully here than in Alfred Hitchcock's I Confess, made a few years later.

The death in an auto accident of a long-retired actress spurs crime reporter Mary Anderson to work up a feature story; the woman was sent to a sanitarium years before for insisting that her fiance's death was actually murder. Pursuing a lead, Anderson interviews a prosperous benefactor of the arts (Paul Lukas), who seems curiously bothered by the visit. Currently, Lukas serves as the patron of an impoverished young pianist/composer (Helmut Dantine; the two actors both appeared in Watch on the Rhine). Dantine is working on something called The Quebec Concerto; an oddly scored work, its orchestra features a Sousaphone rearing its brassy bell.

An overcomplicated but still compelling plot involves Dantine's disturbed shrew of a wife, who's dependent on injections to make her sleep; the discovery of her suicide, which is made to look like murder (well, it seemed to work once); a blackmail scheme to engineer another murder; and a faked death made to look like yet another murder. (Eagle-Lion was not known for the elegant simplicity of its plots.)

Oddly, it all works, if a bit creakily. Mary Anderson suggests two-thirds Teresa Wright and a third Bonita Granville; the latter impression no doubt derives from her sleuthing around in a jaunty tam, like Nancy Drew. She has the distinction (as does the director, the short-lived Fedor Ozep, as he's credited here) of helping to make the best Nancy Drew mystery ever released. That's faint praise, but praise nonetheless.

"Whispering City" is an Eagle-Lion production that was made in Quebec. It's the story of an evil lawyer (dare I be redundant?) who is also quite mentally imbalanced. One of his supposed friends and clients is in trouble--his wife is also very imbalanced and has been making accusations that the husband has been trying to kill her. But the husband is innocent--and his life has been hell due to this crazy lady's erratic behaviors and hateful disposition. He goes to this lawyer to talk about this--not knowing that the lawyer (Paul Lukas) has an incredibly evil plan. And, when the unstable wife kills herself, the lawyer hides all the evidence that would exonerate the husband and makes the man think perhaps he DID kill his wife! Then, the lawyer springs his trap--he announces that he will get his 'friend' acquitted--provided the friend first murder someone for him! Can this innocent man be driven to kill? And, does he even realize he's not guilty, as the lawyer got him very drunk and has been trying to convince him that he really has already killed? And, if the innocent man goes to the authorities, what will happen? After all, the evidence does point to him being guilty.

Despite having an overly complicated plot (and I've omitted a lot of it in the above paragraph), this is a dandy thriller. Despite its humble origins, the film is very well acted, tense and exciting. However, it's very likely you won't find it unless you download it for free at archive.org, as the film is quite obscure and in the public domain.

The early parts of this movie were terribly confusing to me. True, the print I saw was terrible. It looked like 8 millimeter. However, I hung in because of its interesting cast and indeed, it picks up: Mary Anderson was a very appealing actress. Too bad she never became a star. Helmut Dantine was very handsome and his acting is very good, too. And of course, top-billed, we have Paul Lukas. Only four years after his Osacr-winning performance in "Watch on the Rhine," here he is at Eagle-Lion. Talk about the curse of the statue! From its introduction, the music is exceptionally good. The Dantine character is a composer. He has written a piano concerto, which we hear in pieces and then in performance. (Not all of it is performed but it looks like a real orchestra really playing it.) I can't think of a better piece written for a movie except the Korngold cello concerto for the deliriously wonderful "Deception." I love that movie and I love his music. That piece, stripped of the name of Claude Rains's composer, Alexander Hollenius, is now performed and often recorded by major orchestras, as the Korngold Cello Concerto.

Once this movie finds its footing, it's very intriguing. But till then, it's really pretty bad.