Crime sans passion

Offbeat crime yarn features one of the most impressive title sequences of any 1930s film, some innovative editing and fast cutting, a magnetic Claude Rains as the antihero-hero, and the unique Margo (then aged 17, but looking more like 27) with her unusual voice. In its style and presentation, it anticipates films made in later decades. *** out of 4.

This is simply directed by a duo of writers who financed themselves. Hecht was a new introduction for me but looking through his resume I realize I've seen several of his work (who hasn't?). He could really write, and this beats any of Hitchcock's stuff until Notorious which they wrote together.

This is a small film but wickedly clever, all about illusion and ego; indeed if you decide to track it down it must be for the weaving of these two notions.

We have a snooty intellectual, a lawyer, who looks down from his window on the dumb riffraff on the street that he now and then defends in court for amusement, for merely the intellectual challenge of outwitting the law. Justice doesn't play a part. It's all a big show; we see him early in court marvelously perform in front of a grand jury, acquitting a killer.

The film essentially begins when he accidentally kills a scorned girlfriend, setting off the divine farce where he will have to face a higher law. Anticipating the case, our fool walks around setting alibis, doctoring clues, constructing the story he will present to an audience. Leaving her building, he feels that he may be watched from every window. Paranoia creeps in. We watch all this unfold in real time.

This isn't some abstract notion at play, and what separates the truly great films is that they can take it up in its full significance. Namely, that we all carry this intellectual mind constantly trying to plan stories ahead of us, master the narrative. That most of the time we put it to destructive use and only obscure the true world where those things are one.

You'll notice in the film that for all its mechanical cleverness his constructed story is ultimately proved false; the world itself outwits him. That it creates for him so much useless drama and anxiety out of nothing. And that had he been simply honest, to himself first, he would have been with the woman he loves.

Of course it all happens so this intellectual who thinks himself better, above others and law, will find himself down here in the world of human passions, punished by the gods of noir.

What struck me the most however was the following bit. As he begins to plot his escape story, a hovering ghost self (his 'legal mind') appears next to him, dictating the story. It isn't cinematic to see because it creates an easy duality: real and not real, madness and sanity on clean sides.. But it is that illusory self separated from the world, and in the separation it plainly shows the human left behind, lapsing into hallucination.

Cornerstones of noir, and we have them here so clearly: hovering mind, fates and hallucination.

When noir proper would roll around this hovering mind attempting manipulation becomes the elusive fabric of noir world, leaving behind the schmuck to lapse into hallucination. The scene near the end here where the girlfriend appears to him may as well be hallucinated.

Noir Meter: 3/4

This is an unusual and surreal little film, starting from the beginning. The prologue says that the three furies go about the world enticing people to do evil. Then a shadowed figure of a man shoots a woman in cold blood and out of the droplets of the blood come the three furies, looking and laughing like female demons racing into the night.

Then we are in criminal attorney Lee Gentry's (Claude Rains) office. He is mentioning to his legal secretary how he wants to get rid of his current girlfriend, Carmen Brown, a cabaret dancer (Margo), but that instead of that he wound up in a flurry of kisses and vows with her, once again. He wants to dump her for the ice queen, Katy, who does not seem nearly as enthused about him as he is about her. Basically Gentry delivers a monologue about how he just can't resist figuring out what makes the women in his life tick, getting them head over heels in love with him, and then their adoration repels him and causes him to reject them. You get the feeling that maybe Gentry has a 50ish legal secretary exactly because he does not want his bad personal romantic habits to follow him into the office.

In the next scenes Gentry gets everybody on his bad side, the prosecutor, the police, he even sets up a situation to make it look like he feels Carmen has been unfaithful and that is why he is leaving her, making her feel their breakup is her own fault. Up to now everything Gentry has done is because he thinks he is better than everybody else, smarter, that he can take what he wants and not care for other people's feelings. And then he performs one unselfish act and it turns into what could be construed as murder. The police and prosecutors are certainly not going to go easy on him or believe him after he has made fools of them in court on a regular basis. So he sets out to make it look like he could not have committed the murder. His legal mind constructs an intricate alibi, even setting up an alternate fall guy for the murder.

How does this all pan out? Watch and find out. The ending is like a cross between something Robert Serling and Alfred Hitchcock would come up with. Highly recommended. This practically one man show will hold your interest throughout partly due to Ben Hecht's talented writing and direction, and partly due to Rains' outstanding performance.

Beginning with an incredible sequence of the furies, this film about a successful attorney who believes he is far superior to the rest of mankind is a tour de force for the amazing Claude Rains. Very much an early 30's film with those wonderful Freudian overtones. (Margo, the dancer who plays Rains' mistress, was married to Eddie Albert, "Green Acres" and is the mother of Edward Albert, "Butterflies are Free".)

This rarely seen film was the third one made by Claude Rains, and only his second talkie. It was made just after THE INVISIBLE MAN, which gave Rains one of moviedom's best introductory film roles. So CRIME WITHOUT PASSION was sort of hidden by it's predecessor. This is rather curious because it was an early independent film, and it's creators were Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur (the authors of TWENTIETH CENTURY and THE FRONT PAGE; Mr. MacArthur was also the husband of Helen Hayes). This was the first of two independent films made by them, the other being THE SCOUNDREL, a film about an amoral publisher played by Noel Coward. Both are interesting movies, though neither are above better - than - average. Being relatively cheaply made, their defects are too glaring (special effects are quite modest and...well cheap!).

If people remember CRIME WITHOUT PASSION it is because of an early scene where Rains' clever lawyer wins an acquittal by putting a grandfather clock on the stand (symbolically, of course - it doesn't begin speaking and answering questions). The acting is uneven. Rains is superb, but Margo was always a heavy breathing/heavy speaking actress. Probably, she was available from Broadway productions in nearby Manhattan (the film was shot in the Astoria Paramount Studios).

The role of the crooked "mouthpiece" probably was based on William Fallon, the leading criminal attorney in New York City in the 1920s and 1930s. Fallon frequently won acquittals of notorious gangsters, crooked politicians, and criminals. He was not afraid of going beyond the law - even getting into bribing juries. But he was a gifted attorney when he concentrated on his job (unfortunately he was also a heavy drinker, which destroyed his career and shortened his life). Unlike Rains, however, Fallon never killed anybody.