UK mystery
1955
bw 99 min.
Director: George More O'Ferrall
CLV: $49.95 - available
1 disc, catalog # CC1413L
Three Cases is of most interest to American audiences for Orson Welles'
flamboyant and bravura performance as Lord Mountdrago. However, it's equally
important as a showcase for Wendy Toye, one of Britain's first female directors,
and star Alan Badel, who serves as the link to all three stories.
Alan Badel was
born in Manchester in 1923 to a French father and British mother. Winning the
prestigious Bancroft Gold Medal upon graduation from the Royal Academy of
Dramatic Art in London, Badel's entry into the theater was abruptly interrupted
by military service in World War II.
As a paratrooper, Badel made 600 jumps
behind enemy lines. But when the war ended, he was not demobilized, but kept on
in Palestine until 1947. He harbored bitterness for the rest of his life about
this extended service: "They didn't want soldiers who'd seen the kind of war we'd
had rattling around Britain. They though we'd had too much fighting to ever
behave in a civilized way again, so they kept us away from home."
But once back
in England, Badel renewed his career with a vengeance. By 1952, he was playing
Romeo opposite Claire Bloom's Juliet at the Old Vic. DirectorWilliam Dieterle
(The Devil and Daniel Webster ) saw him in the play, tested him, and brought him
to Hollywood for his film debut as John the Baptist to Rita Hayworth's Salome.
The film was slammed, but Badel walked off with the notices; not bad, considering
he was in the company of Charles Laughton and Cedric Hardwicke.
Returning to
England in 1953, Badel made his British screen debut in a memorable film, The
Stranger Left No Card, a macabre murder story that was former ballerina and
choreographer Wendy Toye's first film.
Toye, born in London in 1917, made her
dancing debut at age four at the Royal Albert Hall. By 1950, she'd co-directed
and choreographed Leonard Bernstein's Broadway musical, Peter Pan, which starred
Jean Arthur and Boris Karloff. She went on to The Stranger Left No
Card, winning the Cannes Film Festival Award for best short fiction film. She
followed that success with another murder mystery-our first story-Roderick
Wilson's In the Picture, in which we are transported by a stranger in Victorian
garb (Badel) into an alternate world.
Toye was fortunate to have the legendary Georges Perinal as her
cinematographer. The French expatriate had shot some of Korda's greatest
successes in the '30s (Rembrandt, Things to Come) and had won the Oscar for The
Thief of Baghdad. He brings to In the Picture the same off-balanced framing that
he had employed in Carol Reed's The Fallen Idol, and the effect is suitably
eerie. Following this film, Toye abandoned the macabre, and went on to direct a series of
successful screen comedies, including Raising a Riot.
In the second story, You Killed Elizabeth, George and Edgar (John Gregson and Emrys
Jones) are best friends, until they both fall in love with the beautiful
Elizabeth, who is murdered duting one of Edgar's blackouts. Although Badel only
plays the tiny role of the bartender, his role proves essential in the end.
The third story, Somerset Maugham's Lord Mountdrago, was originally announced as
a vehicle for Ralph Richardson, happily provided Welles with one of his
best, least appreciated roles. It also reunited him with Badel, with whom he
had co-starred two years earlier in Peter Brook's legendary TV production of King
Lear.
Mountdrago is the British Foreign Secretary and the avowed enemy of Owen
(Badel), a fiery Welsh Parliamentarian, whose career Mountdrago ruins through
public ridicule. Owen puts a curse on the Foreign Secretary, and there follows a
trio of dream sequences--directed with great zest by George More O'Ferrall--that
rival Rex Harrison's fatasies in Preston Sturges' Unfaithfully Yours. Welles'
leading the House of Commons in a spirited version of "Bicycle Built for Two" may
be one of the funniest scenes in screen history.
Badel's
exotic looks and manner did not fit in with the conventional screen image of the
blue-blazered, terribly British '50s film stars like Kenneth More, Nigel Patrick,
and David Tomlinson (all, incidentally, leading men in later Wendy Toye
features). He would have one more starring role the following year as Wagner in
William Dieterle's last major film, Magic Fire, a failure for all
concerned.
Ironically, as Badel grew older, his exotica paid off with supporting
roles in the two films for which American audiences remember him best: as Sophia
Loren's wicked sugar daddy in Arabesque, and as the Latin American dictator in
The Adventurers. He died in 1982.
Produced by Ian Dalrymple (Pygmalion, Raising a Riot )this film is a sterling example of the trio movies that so delighted
audiences in the early '50s. If your taste runs to horror, whodunnit, and
homicide, Three Cases of Murder is a must.
--Charles Dennis
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