Crown v. Stevens

I find this film is an interesting character piece. It reminded me of Hitchcock's 'Blackmail' (1929). It is not easy making a film where the main character is flawed. Other reviewers talked of moral ambiguity in a negative way, but clean, clear country values often don't exist in the city. In Spanish language the word for city is the same as the word for caution or warning. To me this is an extended view of the difficult moral choices that people living in a city make. Dating, marriage & ethics in an economic environment. 'The Naked City' (1948) also covers this territory. I would classify this movie as a universal type story. Film noir films is said to have been made between 1940 & 1958; but I agree with another reviewer that this is an early example.

Looking at that title, one would be forgiven for thinking that this is a courtroom drama. However, much to my pleasant surprise, there isn't a single shot of a single courtroom in the whole thing. The title is something I would change (an observation I don't often make), but underneath it is another Hitchcockian adventure in the underbelly of interwar England where the wrong man gets caught in between a murder and his own safety.

Chris Jensen (Patric Knowles) works at an interior designer as an office boy. He's fallen in love with a girl, Mamie (Mabel Poulton) whom he gives a diamond ring he hasn't yet paid for, feeling like a promotion is just around the corner from his boss, Mr. Stevens (Frederick Piper). However, she takes the ring, runs off with another man, leaving Chris with the bill for the ring he doesn't even have anymore, a bill due to the nefarious Maurice (Morris Harvey). However, when Chris goes to negotiate the payments, something he can't being to pay back because Mr. Stevens denied him the promotion, he finds Maurice dead, shot by a mysterious woman who ends up being Mrs. Stevens (Beatrix Thomas). Borrowing money because her husband won't let her spend the way she wants.

So, there's a murder. Chris knows who it is, but he can't give her up because Mr. Stevens could fire him for embroiling himself as well as Mr. Stevens in scandal, besides Maurice will be missed by no one. He tries to forget what's going on, striking up a romance with the designer Molly (Glennis Lorimer), and keep his head down. Meanwhile, the police are on the case, looking for clues.

What's interesting about this is how we know exactly who the killer is from the beginning, and it's all about this dance around wanting Chris to turn her in, understanding his precarious situation, and watching as Mrs. Stevens steadily self-destructs. Freed from her illicit debts but not freed from her penny-pinching husband, she's egged on by her friend Ella (Googie Withers), putting her in direct conflict with her husband, all while Chris' conscience weighs more heavily on him and the police get closer through investigation of the gun used to kill Maurice.

The plotting is mostly very tight around the movements of the police closer to Mrs. Stevens. I say mostly tight because it relies on her taking the gun she used, throwing it off a bridge, and it immediately falling into a passing boat, the occupants of which take the gun to the police. Coincidence isn't something I'm totally against in drama. It's perfectly acceptable in setting things up, but this is kind of the middle ground where it's about making the drama more difficult (fine). However, it feels so convenient that it's kind of unbelievable. It's not the film's greatest moment, but it's over and done with quickly.

The final couple of reels, though, where Mrs. Stevens feels the most cornered with Mr. Stevens asking too many questions about the gun she can no longer account for and his continued pressure for her to stop spending money and living flagrantly out of order with his moral code (she parties with Ella), is where we get this specific level of detail around her efforts that ends up feeling most Hitchcockian. The devil is in the details, and we watch as Mrs. Stevens improvises a murder, starting with sleeping pills and needing to evolve as he insists on going to the police station, not quite hobbled by the pills she secretly fed him, and needing to involve a car, a closed garage door, and time.

So, we get our ticking clock as Chris and Molly (now in on the situation) stop by to investigate while the Stevens maid, Mamie (Mabel Poulton), who quit to preserve her character when Mrs. Stevens accused her of stealing the missing pistol and ran to the police. So, Mrs. Stevens' efforts feel like she flailing, but not completely without some method to it. She could almost have gotten away with it, sneaking by suspicions if only things had worked out a slightly different way.

And that last twenty minutes really makes the film. Everything before that had been perfectly fine. I had few complaints, mostly about the coincidence of the gun drop as well as the fact that Mamie never comes back into the film, making the opening feel like something of a waste. However, it's actually pretty solid stuff overall, and the ending is kind of great.

A few years later, this would have been a film noir. It's an early work by Michael Powell. And the guy knew something about noir: How about "Peeping Tom"! Patric Knowles is perfect as the central character. He is a bit timid. He's genuinely attractive; so we understand why the ladies like him. He has a gentle quality that makes us care what happens to him.

This movie, like much film noir, involves a mercenary woman. There's a good woman, too.

It's directed smoothly and moves along quickly. I can't think of anything to fault it for. It's not a great movie. But it's an extremely skillful presentation.

A clean little quota quickie which has some affinities to post war film noir. The femme fatale in this one is a bit more dreary than her noir sisters. The greatest affinity however that this film, and most of the other better quota quickies, is that they had straight ahead, no nonsense scripts, and a throw away sense of economics - no one really cared what the final product was as long as it was done for a price- and therefore no interference from producers and executives (who didn't exist at the time). The finished films were simply effective stories told in no nonsense fashion. Compared to today's films with their interminable lists of co-producers, executive producers and just plain producers, all of whom have massive insecurity and ego problems as well as overwhelming inferiority complexes, causing them all to have to put in various proprietary bits of business to show that they played an important part in the production of the film, the good quota quickie, like the film noir, works like a palate refresher.

Despite the somewhat misleading title of Crown VS Stevens (it's not a courtroom drama) the picture gets into the story from the start and marches off in a direct line to the denouement in a very satisfying way. Another similarity with the noir is the absence of star ego. Stories have not been manipulated because some big ego wants all of the good lines to do or have the double do acts of daring do etc. In fact in Crown VS. Stevens, a British Warner production, the lead actor Patric Knowles would be whisked off to Hollywood to appear as Errol Flynn's brother in Charge of the Light Brigade and begin a long career. In Crown Vs. Stevens what you see is what you get.

There are no twists or turns to the story, but there are various forking paths open to moral interpretation. Taken on this level there are layers upon layers of moral ambiguity, not the least of which is the identification with the crimes of Crime and Punishment, except in this film there is absolutely no guilt creeping into the consciousness of the femme fatale, the sociopathic element that was the hallmark of the noir. But that's getting a little too carried away and heaping too much significance on this amusing little film.

If you're looking for directorial distinctiveness (because the film was directed by the great Michael Powell), you'll be hard pressed to find much of it in this movie. Powell simply moves the story along deftly, managing the many dead ends and fresh starts in the plot so that they all seem quite natural. The plot itself is tepid by today's standards (and possibly also by the standards of the time). Certainly the shock value of a woman's role in the death of a moneylender is minimal. Some of the acting is a bit over-the-top, but when the characters appear at their most natural in their day-to-day working-stiff lives, they shine the most. Overall, as satisfying as the experience was, I couldn't give this film more than six stars.