Jalousie

If you're in the mood for a flamboyant Bette Davis-Claude Rains melodrama, you've got to see this one. Rains all but steals the film as the genius composer with some of the cruelest and wittiest lines ever uttered by this talented actor. Bette matches him with a finely controlled display of emotions and Paul Henreid is altogether convincing in a rather thankless role as her ex-lover who re-enters her life and incurs the wrath of Rains. For the cello concerto, Erich Wolfgang Korngold provides a robust, darkly thrilling piece of work that gets the full treatment toward the climax of the story. A very satisfying look at Davis and Rains at the peak of their powers. I love the comment by Cecilia Ager of PM who wrote: "It's like grand opera, only the people are thinner. I wouldn't have missed it for the world." If you're a Claude Rains fan--and there are MANY, MANY of them out there--you might have read my profile on his career in CLASSIC IMAGES, a long article with many photos that appeared in the December 2000 issue.

Deception (1946)

A marvelous chamber piece, in a way, involving orchestral music. The cast begins with two principals, played with usual intensity by Bette Davis and with usual restraint by Paul Henreid. This broods a bit and suggests trouble, and then comes the third player, who outdoes them both, in the form of Claude Rains. The rest of the movie is an interplay between the three, a push and pull and game of dodging and, of course, deception.

So how to judge this kind of tightly woven enterprise? It feels as though William Wyler could have directed it, so polished and rich it all is. But this is a Warner Brothers drama, so there is another kind of layer of dark danger, and of a noir inspired lighting and camera-work. This visual aspect, in a way, is the real star of the film, which says a lot, considering the high level of acting involved.

In all it's purely an entertainment, but at the highest level. The backdrop of classic music and classical musicians hasn't worn well over the years, but I grew up with this kind of scene and it brought back a lot of those vibes. A terrific movie within its own genre.

One of the few actors of Bette Davis' time who could match her screen intensity was Claude Rains. Paul Henreid is paired with Davis as her true love for another convincing romance. But, the script-stealing scene is between Davis and Rains. Matched penultimately perfect for the picture, Davis and Rains match each other's most intense acting skills during a major bedroom blow-out between them. I live to watch that scene over and again for its acting mastery.

Since Deception is about three classical music artists, the classical music score makes Deception's choice script musically enhanced to a classy degree. I love how Rains takes "the 4th Warner Brother's" acting intensity and levels it with his own. Even Bogie couldn't do that when staged with Davis! Don't miss this tightly wound triangulation with Henreid underplaying himself as his role calls for.

How did I never come across Deception (1946) before? It's got to be Claude Rains' most delicious role. He absolutely has a blast playing the grand, tyrannical, jealous composer who hates giving Bette up to Paul Henreid, her former lover who has just returned from Europe at the end of the war. Both men are wickedly jealous of each other. The scene where the great composer unexpectedly arrives at Bette's and Paul's festive wedding party at her great loft apartment overlooking the river in New York (modeled on Leonard Bernstein's apartment) and trades poisonous banter with Bette and Paul makes the movie worth it by itself. But every scene is a gem, such as the scene where Claude takes them to a haute cuisine French restaurant and spends 10 minutes going back and forth over whether to order pheasant, trout, or saddle of lamb and whether to go with a Hermitage or a Vosne Romanee wine. This is some of the sharpest, wittiest dialogue I've seen in a movie, rivaling Ernst Lubitsch and every bit as good as in All About Eve. Oh, and I forgot to mention the amazingly good symphony performance scenes, with an original cello concerto by Korngold, ("played" by Henreid with the arms of two real cellists reaching in from either side to play the instrument). And Bette, a trained pianist, playing Beethoven at her wedding party (she really wanted to play it herself but Jack Warner decided against it but you can see she knows what she's doing in fingering the keys). If you haven't seen it, do check it out.

On a recent Turner Classic Movies broadcast, I finally caught up with all of this one, having seen only snippets of it before. Everybody involved was obviously given free rein, from the lead actors all the way through to every behind-the-scenes artisan, the best that Warner Brothers could muster at the time. Claude Rains and Bette Davis spar in magnificent style, with Rains, stroking the fur of his pet Siamese cat, winning by default, since he was given a role which is so over-the-top that, in the hands of a lesser actor, it would have verged on outrageous camp. (Check out the rococo New York brownstone mansion in which he's ensconced, more magnificent than anything a lesser studio could provide for a monarch in a story involving royalty!)

Poor Paul Henreid has a particularly thankless role to play, swinging like an erratic pendulum between jealous tantrums and thoroughly deceived naïveté, but his simulations of the movements of a top-flight cello musician are convincing enough to allow all to be forgiven.

Erich Wolfgang Korngold's music is probably the film's chief asset and it probably sounded superb over the monophonic sound systems when this film was released, since Warners' sound technicians were the best in Hollywood back then. (Unfortunately the soundtrack during the telecast I heard was very wobbly - a real disappointment. Wonder what the problem was, since this certainly isn't the case with many films dating even further into the past.)

While it may not be a delicacy fit for a cinematic gourmet, it's more than passably entertaining for its nearly two-hours running time.