Monday, October 2, 2017

Whirlpool (20th Century-Fox, 1949)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I looked last night for something from my backlog of recordings from TCM back when I could still make recordings and found an intriguing item called Whirlpool, a 20th Century-Fox film gris (my term for movies that attempt film noir and don’t quite make it) that reunited director Otto Preminger and star Gene Tierney from Laura (though most of Laura was actually directed by Rouben Mamoulian, whose “touch” shows in that film’s intense visual richness, characteristic of Mamoulian’s work and uncharacteristic of Preminger’s) in a wild tale which Charles recalled having read about in books on hypnosis as one of the most flagrantly inaccurate fictional portrayals of it. The plot casts Tierney as Ann Sutton, wife of psychiatrist Dr. William Sutton (Richard Conte, outrageously miscast in a role that cried out for Gregory Peck), who in the opening scene is caught shoplifting a $300 (in 1949 dollars!) piece of jewelry from a store to which she and her affluent husband have a charge account. She’s apprehended in the parking lot by a store security guard and placed under citizen’s arrest, but she’s bailed out — so to speak — by the mysterious David Korvo (José Ferrer), an astrologer, psychic and master hypnotist who uses his powers to latch on to independently wealthy women and suck them dry financially. We later learn that Ann Sutton is independently wealthy but has never been allowed to live a rich-and-famous (or even rich-and-not-so-famous) lifestyle, first because when he was alive her dad wouldn’t allow her to spend any money on luxury items for herself; then when he died he continued his control over her finances by locking up his entire fortune in trusts; and when she married Dr. Sutton he insisted that they live on his money (he didn’t have any to speak of then, though later he became successful and they did) and not touch hers. Supposedly she became a kleptomaniac because as a child the only way she could have anything nice was to steal it, and while she’d stopped stealing after her dad died Dr. Sutton’s demand that they live only on his money reawakened her kleptomania. David Korvo uses his “hold” on Ann to insist that she start dating him — thinking he’s blackmailing her, she writes him a check for $5,000 but he tears it up — and through his hypnotic powers he’s able to get her to sleep (something she’s been previously unable to do) and worms his way into her consciousness until he manages to get her to enter the house of one of his previous con victims, Theresa Randolph (Barbara O’Neil, afflicted by hair stylist Marie Walter with a weird grey streak in her hair that makes her look like the Bride of Frankenstein), whom he’s just killed, so he can set her up for his crime.

Just then Korvo has a medical emergency — his gall bladder goes haywire and he needs an operation to have it removed — and he figures being near death in a hospital bed will give him an unimpeachable alibi for Randolph’s murder. Only he really intends to hypnotize himself to be able to walk out of his hospital bed, leave the hospital and go to Randolph’s house, where Dr. Sutton (ya remember Dr. Sutton?) has persuaded the police detective in charge of investigating the Randolph murder, Lt. James Colton (Charles Bickford), to let him take Ann in hopes that something there will jog her memory and she’ll be able to identify the real killer. There’s also another MacGuffin: large transcription records Dr. Sutton made of his therapy sessions with Randolph, who was one of his patients and who told him all about her run-ins and brief affair with Korvo — only the records were stolen from his office by Ann under Korvo’s hypnotic control. Korvo beats the good guys to the Randolph home and plays the records while waiting for them, and when they arrive he pulls a gun on Ann and tells her he won’t shoot her if she lets him get away — but eventually his medical injuries catch up with him and, after picturesquely dropping blood all over the Randolph floor and letting loose with a wild shot that misses all the other humans in the room but destroys the Randolph record, he dies. The End. Whirlpool started life as a novel by Guy Endore and got turned into a film script by Ben Hecht and Andrew Solt — both writers with far better credits than this one — though because Hecht was not only financially supporting the Jewish guerrillas in Israel in the late 1940’s who were fighting not only the Palestinian Arabs but the British who were still in overall control of Palestine as a protectorate, he was soliciting contributions for this dubious cause from every other Jew in Hollywood and making public statements like it gladdened his heart every time a British solder in Palestine was killed, the British Board of Film Censors refused to let this film be released in the U.K. unless Hecht’s name was taken off it, so on the British prints he was billed as “Lester Barstow.”

Whirlpool is the sort of frustrating movie whose basic plot could have been a weird and compelling thriller if the writers hadn’t piled on one unbelievable situation on top of another, and if Preminger had been able to bring any sense of atmosphere to the direction. Instead he and cinematographer Arthur C. Miller (who’d shown in his credits for more creative directors that he could do atmospherics) shoot virtually the whole movie in even grey tonalities; it’s not until the final reel, starting with Korvo’s escape from the hospital, that Whirlpool even looks like a film noir. About the only thing it has going for it is José Ferrer’s superbly oily performance as the villain — in this kind of story the villains are usually more interesting than the heroes, and that’s true here even more than usual — and even Ferrer looks flummoxed in the later stages by what the writers are trying to make us believe his character would do. (The contortions he goes into as he’s trying to hypnotize himself into being able to walk out of the hospital and drive to the Randolph house without pain make him look like he’s about to turn into Mr. Hyde — and arguably Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde might have been a good role for Ferrer.) Whirlpool is another Otto Preminger loser — the script required visual atmospherics and dramatic subtlety, never directorial tasks Preminger was good at (his best films, Anatomy of a Murder and Advise and Consent, worked largely because their stories didn’t need visual atmosphere) — and though Gene Tierney was one of the few actors who actually liked working for the tyrannical Preminger (they made four films together), the cruelest irony of Whirlpool was that it cast Tierney as a mental patient six years before she became one for real and spent years in therapy, burning through the entire fortune she’d accumulated as a Hollywood star, from which she was bailed out only by marrying a Texas oil multimillionaire and never having to work again.