Triple Thrill

Here comes a triple-header: three British “thrillers” - actually quota films, cheaply produced to fill government mandated quotas for local content. But out of The Phantom Light/Red Ensign/The Upturned Glass (1934/1934/1937), two were directed by Michael Powell, and one stars James Mason.

Red Ensign is about shipbuilding (cue Elvis Costello). English-flagged merchant shipping is dying, and nobody wants to buy new hulls. Marine engineer Leslie Banks has a plan to reduce fuel costs 30%, and starts building 20 new ships, against the wishes of his board of directors. They have a point. But he’ll do anything to get these ships built, including risk the love and fortune of Carol Goodner. All this is quite boring. The good parts are the shipbuilding montages. It seems that Michael Powell had been studying Eisenstein’s montage theory. So there are lot of dynamic, exciting, documentary-like sequences of great crowds of working men and metal.

It turns out that the only way these ships would make money is if the government passed a quota law, mandating a percentage of shipping for British ships. A metaphor for the film quotas?

The Phantom Light is actually the reason I got this disc-of-three-movies. It stars Binnie Hale and Gordon Harker, last seen (by me) in Hyde Park Corner. He plays a gruff lighthouse keeper, posted to a remote Welsh village. She plays a silly girl who wants to investigate the ghosts in said lighthouse. Ian Hunter (cue Mott the Hoople) is a reporter also investigating. But of course, the haunting (the titular phantom light) is a scheme to wreck ships for the salvage.

I rather like both Hale and Harker - she’s kind of a Joan Blondell type, while he’s a sort of British Lloyd Nolan. The movie is kind of batty, full of comedy, action, suspense, but not to any great degree. Powell, at the helm, again shows an affinity for machinery, presenting a realistic looking lighthouse, as well. Probably the best character.

The Upturned Glass is at the top of the bill for a reason. It stars James Mason as a medical lecturer, telling his class about a perfectly sane criminal that he, um, heard about. This criminal, a doctor who looks like James Mason, falls in love with a married woman (Rosamund John) when he operates on her daughter. Her husband is always away, and she is so lonely... They start to spend time together, but when he confesses his love to her, she insists that they must never meet again.

Shortly afterwards, he runs into her coarse sister-in-law, played by Pamela Mason, James Mason’s wife. She tells him that John fell out of a window and died - either accidentally or a suicide. Mason thinks she was killed, probably by her sister-in-law. He romances her, hoping to find the secret, and then, decides to kill her.

At this point, we drop back out of the story, into the lecture, when a student declares that this man must me insane, but Mason assures him that he is perfectly sane. And goes off to kill the sister-in-law.

The finale is both tense and twisty. And you get to decide if he is sane, as he insists, or mad, as everyone else does.

All in all, a great triple bill, made up of two B-movies and an A-.