Cry Wolf - 1947

In “Cry Wolf” (1947), we have another look at a non-swashbuckling Errol Flynn, this time as the master of a gloomy country estate where family secrets are deadly.

We’re dovetailing themes here, concluding a two-part look at Flynn’s non-Errol roles, and beginning a couple of weeks of Halloween-themed offerings. This movie even starts with credits printed in an exaggerated font that wipe mistily away, evoking the melting style of 1930s monster movies. We might even wonder if the title, “Cry Wolf” infers the presence of werewolves on this foggy bit of real estate. However, Maria Ouspenskaya is nowhere to be seen, so you may rest easy. No werewolves. They’re all at casting calls for other movies.

Instead, we have a spirited Barbara Stanwyck as woman on a mission, part Nancy Drew and part commando.

Mr. Flynn is Mark Caldwell, whose nephew and ward has suddenly died. Miss Stanwyck barges in on the preparations for the funeral announcing she is the bride of his nephew. She’s come for the inheritance.

When they first meet, Errol is at his desk in the library. He does not look up at her, but continues working, either because he is very busy or he wants to impress upon her that she is unimportant. He finally glances up, wearing round Harold Lloyd-type reading glasses. It’s an almost comic moment, and we never see them again for the rest of film, but it shows us from the start that Errol is firmly telling his audience he’s someone else they may not be expecting.

Geraldine Brooks makes her film debut as Flynn’s niece, also under his guardianship. She is the sister of the deceased nephew. She is a willful, unhappy girl, chafing under the protection and authoritarian supervision of her Uncle Errol. Miss Brooks, like the rest of the family, is stunned to have Miss Stanwyck plopping herself down at the dinner table as the newest member of the clan, but Geraldine’s isolation on this estate is so acute (Flynn forbids her to see her boyfriend), that she welcomes Stanwyck as a big sister. She needs one.

Jerome Cowan has a small role as Flynn’s brother, a United States Senator, with whom Flynn shares urgent, whispered conferences and hasty plans. Mr. Cowan’s most memorable movie role was probably as the attorney who prosecutes Edmund Gwenn in “Miracle on 34th Street” (1947), and he also played in a slew of “Blondie” movies, but he has one of those reliable character actor faces that make you think you’ve seen him in just about everything.

I wonder if this is the last time we would see Barbara Stanwyck with light brown, shoulder-length hair? She soon adopted the 1950s shorter cuts and famously let her hair turn gray. Perhaps the longer, darker hair was used in this film purposely to emphasize her youth. She is supposed to be a woman possibly in her late 20s, who has just completed her doctoral studies in Geology.

When Flynn, obviously suspicious of her abrupt presentation, questions her on her supposed secret marriage to his nephew with the enormous trust fund, she replies in quite an open and businesslike way that she and the nephew, who is named Jim Demarest, were not in love. They were good chums, and he asked her to marry him so he could circumvent the rules of his trust fund, which stipulated that he could not get any of his money before the age of 30, unless he were married. Jim promised to give Stanwyck $2,000 to use for her doctoral studies if she helped him out by becoming his bride. They intended to divorce after the check cleared.

I think if any other actress gave this astonishing speech, we might cringe with disgust or laugh with incredulous disbelief. Barbara Stanwyck has that take-no-prisoners glint in her lovely brown eyes that makes you not only believe her wild tale of practical avarice, but admire her for it as well. Rarely does a gold-digger earn such respect.

Or, is she truly after the millions in the trust fund? Is there something else? Miss Stanwyck hints that Jim told her of his scheming Uncle Errol, a control freak who tightly held the reins on the family and the family money, who might stop at nothing to keep what’s his. Is she here really to investigate the suspicious death of her college chum?

Mr. Flynn brooks no nonsense from anyone, but he suffers Stanwyck’s boldness with courtly, if cold, patience. He slings muted accusations back in her face, noting with wry and controlled confrontation that her husband’s death seems quite a convenient thing for her. The two have many scenes in this movie sparring intellectually, and gradually there are moments when the contempt and mistrust they feel for each other lifts ever so slightly, like the cold mist outside, to reveal understanding, and even passion if circumstances were different.

It is, like “That Forsyte Woman” (1949) discussed in our last post, a departure role for Errol Flynn. He is anything but swashbuckling or even energetic in this film. He displays restraint, coolness, and many layers of a mysterious man. It is perhaps as equally challenging a role as the one he played in “That Forsyte Woman” because it is cerebral, but he gets less opportunity here to display his terrific acting range. This is a more muted role.

Because this is a creepy mystery movie, we are more plot-bound and less delving into character here. If the actors open up too much and allow us to think we know them, there is no mystery. We have to be as uncertain about their integrity and motives as we are about what’s going to happen next.

So, Flynn is crisp, occasionally domineering, but always behind a gentlemanly, self-contained demeanor. He calls his new sister-in-law Mrs. Demarest with rigid propriety. He never fails to pull out her chair, or stand when she enters. He watches her like a hawk.

So does young Geraldine Brooks, but in her case it is with fascination and with needy affection, that can be as pitiful as it as manipulative. Big sister Barbara takes her in hand, reassures her anxieties, and listens to her complaints about Uncle Errol. She listens hard. She also asks questions. What, for instance, is that closed-off wing of the house used for?
Why, it’s only Uncle Errol’s LABORATORY, silly.

Gulp!

What’s a gloomy mansion without a laboratory? Look in any real estate ad, you’ll find that listed as one of the perks.

Barbara discovers that Uncle Errol is some kind of scientist, and that he works mainly at night.

Working in a home laboratory mainly at night usually raises eyebrows among the neighbors.

This mansion set, by the way, is a great piece of work. Several levels, grand staircases, dark wood paneling. It must have been used again for another film; it’s too good not to use again.

We are never told the exact location of the estate, but it is mentioned that a nearby town is called Salem, and the family owns a townhouse in Boston, so I’m assuming this is probably the North Shore of Massachusetts. Maybe so. All I can say is Flynn’s Tasmanian accent fits in better here than in Dodge City.

While Barbara mulls over the circumstances of her chum/husband’s death (He supposedly died of pneumonia, which makes her wonder, why the closed casket?), she comforts Miss Brooks’ attack of nerves. The girl claims to hear a man’s tortured screaming in the night. Uncle Errol has told her these spells of hers are only nightmares. Miss Stanwyck might agree, the girl is quite emotional, but then Barbara starts hearing the screams of agony herself.

When Miss Brooks shows her Jim’s bedroom, Barbara notices that his collection of pipes, and his clothes are missing. She begins to wonder if the screaming at night has been coming from a still very much alive Jim. She wonders if he is in the LABORATORY.

Morphing into Nancy Drew, Barbara decides to sneak a look in the second floor LABORATORY. It is locked, so she waits until the dead of night, and hauls herself up in the dumbwaiter.

(Just as a bit of trivia, in the movie “Smilla’s Sense of Snow” (1997), Julia Ormond also gains passage into a secret room by pulling herself up in a dumbwaiter. In “Sabrina” (1954), William Holden suggests to Humphrey Bogart that they sneak Audrey Hepburn into his room via the dumbwaiter. Clearly this is a feminine trait. Can you think of any other movies where women are stuffed into dumbwaiters? Or men? Children? Small pets?)

Now that I’ve thoroughly distracted you, the dumbwaiter scene is quite tense, because she’s timed her entrance wrong, and Flynn is still in his lab. He discovers her presence (with the help of her reflection in a water cooler, and a missing hair comb), but does not let on he knows she is there. He plans to reel her in later.

This is not Miss Stanwyck’s only stunt. Later on she tries to enter the LABORATORY another way: by climbing out onto the wet slate roof in a skirt and heels. Okay, they’re low to medium heels, not high heels, but they’re still heels. She drops herself through a skylight. She lands like an acrobat, not a shoulder pad out of place.

Barbara Stanwyck loved doing her own stunts, and did them right on through her “Big Valley” days when she was in her early 60s. All the fence climbing, falling from a horse, running through a dark mansion in this movie was probably child’s play to Barbara.

Another round of subtle cerebral sparring with Errol over a round of cordials he makes himself according to an old family recipe called “tears of blood”, (yikes) we are confronted with new suspicions about both of them. Who has whose best interest at heart? We may wonder if Errol intends to poison her. But he kisses her.

“Purely research,” he says with a sneer. He wanted to see if his first impression of her was accurate. She slaps his face over his intentionally cryptic comment, but we begin to wonder is she is afraid of him, or only of what may be her feelings for him. He is probably the first man she has ever met who is her match in intellect, self discipline, and courage.

Then Geraldine Brooks is found dead on the terrace outside her bedroom window. Miss Stanwyck believes Mr. Flynn has killed her for her share of the inheritance.

Overhearing a conversation between him and his gamekeeper, she thinks she knows where Jim is being hidden on the estate, and she sets out to find him. When she does, we see her chum/husband is Richard Basehart, so fine at playing sensitive, even emotionally brittle roles, but his part is unfortunately small in this movie. At first he does not remember her, and he tells her he is being drugged.

After a while, he snaps out of it, remembers her, remembers his wrath for Uncle Errol, who is trying to steal his money and trying to kill him.

The movie ends with a bold escape, a recital of hushed-up family scandals involving a history of hereditary insanity (as common a plot device in old movies as creepy mansions and secret laboratories), and a final showdown between Miss Stanwyck, Mr. Basehart, and Uncle Errol.

It’s a movie whose plot is a bit weak in spots, but is enjoyable for excellent work by all the principle actors. Errol Flynn adds another offbeat movie to his resume, and it’s fun to see him in this role, but it’s really Stanwyck’s movie.

She had the ability, probably better than most of her contemporaries, to show deep and passionate emotion with very little histrionics or demonstrative methods. Not that she couldn’t all-out rant or flip out with the best of them, but in roles such as this one, she seethed, smoldered, suspected, and, in turn, was suspected, with effortless transparency. Like falling off a log for this dame. Or a skylight.

"That Forsyte Woman" - 1949

In “That Forsyte Woman” (1949), Errol Flynn gives a riveting performance as a jerk. He is a man of substantial self-importance, without humor or any self-effacing quality which might be termed human. And yet, he turns this characterization on its axis, and we find ourselves fascinated, and ultimately sympathetic with his very human flaws.

He plays Soames Forsyte in this dramatization of the John Galsworthy classic stories. Greer Garson is a lady of no particular age, whose loveliness in this role is tempered by her wretchedness, and a sordid realization that she has compromised on many levels the integrity we are meant to believe in her, hurting herself and others.

She is a piano teacher, poor and alone in the world, with only her beauty and her finer qualities of character to recommend her, who marries the snobbish Errol Flynn mainly because she is exhausted from refusing him, which she had done a number of times.

But we are told time and again in this movie that what Errol wants, Errol gets, through shear willpower and determination.

It probably does not need to be said, but one is compelled to note again how mind-blowingly handsome this man was.

Right, then. Continuing…

Though he beams with the triumph of ownership when she becomes his bride, Errol soon realizes with bitterness that a woman is not a piece of furniture or an object of art, or any pretty bauble that one buys and owns, because he cannot own all of her. He does not have her heart.

Walter Pidgeon is on board as Errol’s cousin and Greer’s sympathetic friend, and eventual soul mate. This is only right and proper; he is, after all, Walter Pidgeon.

Robert Young is a cheeky young architect engaged to Janet Leigh, who is Walter’s daughter. However (insert ominous chords of music here), Robert and Greer are scandalously attracted to each other, and fall in love. All told, there are three suitors in this film after Greer Garson. Not a bad gig.

Set in London in the 1880s, the film is rich with Victorian set dressing, lush costuming, gaslight, and impenetrable fog. We find ourselves in elegant drawing rooms, art galleries, and cold, stark artists’ studios.

The Forsytes are only a couple generations removed from working class people, but now they are the newly wealthy, and as stuck up as possible, regarding every privilege as a birthright and every non-family member as an underling.

Harry Davenport plays Walter Pidgeon’s father, the patriarch of this stuffy clan. Walter, however, is banished from their company because he is the black sheep. For one, he is an artist, not a man of business. For another, he eloped with his baby daughter’s nursery governess after the death of his wife and ran off to Paris to paint. He left his daughter, Janet Leigh, in the care of his powerful family, who forbid him to see her.

There is so much to look at in this film, but one is always distracted by the elegant Errol Flynn, who wears his impatient pomposity like a monarch’s robe; something he has been born to, deserves, and never fails to parade. What finally induces Greer to marry him is possibly his enormous self confidence. For many women, this is as much a lure of security as a healthy bank book.

This quality may be what Mr. Flynn understands most about the character and why he plays it so well. He was himself a man of prodigious self confidence, a person for whom perhaps everything came easy. Boredom and restlessness result from this trait as much as does success. It can be a double-edged sword. It probably was in Flynn’s case.

What strikes the viewer is the playfulness, even more than the understanding, that he brings to this character. He seems to enjoy wearing a pince-nez. In one scene, he enters the dim hall of Greer’s boarding house, and his top hat smacks against the chandelier. He gives it a glance of longsuffering loathing, refusing to surrender his dignity. It is moment of comedy, and a glimpse into Flynn’s ability to be self-effacing even if Soames Forsyte is not.

His characterization is not parody, however. Mr. Flynn has another good scene over the dinner table with Greer on their wedding anniversary. He is chafing under her polite formality with him, knowing that despite her acquiescence to his every whim, including letting him choose her dresses for her, she cannot love him with the passion he seems to feel he has bought and paid for. We are meant to take it as a slight to his vanity throughout the film, for he never indicates his passion for her. It is only at the end of the movie we see his wounded heart and feel sorry for him.

Until then, he only displays irritability as a mask for his hurt feelings. At one point during the course of his brittle dinner conversation, a scene that shows marvelous restraint, he accuses her of forgetting their anniversary. When at last he discovers under a napkin the gift she has left on his plate, he is contrite and vulnerable. Flynn does excellent work in this tense scene.

Obviously, for purposes of the film, the Galsworthy stories are condensed and somewhat altered, but the movie is a good introduction to the troubled and tragic Forsyte family.

Greer becomes almost instantly attracted to Robert Young, who, open and fun-loving, a man who talks to children as an equal, is by nature the exact opposite of Mr. Flynn. He pursues her, and she refuses him because, more than the threat of scandal, she does not want to betray her beloved “niece”, Janet Leigh, who is like a companion to her. However, they are all tragedy bound.

Greer starts this film visiting a morgue, a haunted expression on her face, her eyes puffy. It is an unglamorous beginning. Though in some scenes she still produces gaiety with that trademark slip of laughter in her voice, she is for the most part an unhappy woman in this film. She is a victim of circumstances, of her own bad choices, and fate.

Walter Pidgeon is also tragic, but he appears as a more romantic figure for all his melancholy perhaps because, unlike Greer and Errol, he is true to his heart and honest about his feelings. He is a gentle, kindly man, humble about his artistic talent, who wants to reunite with his daughter. It is funny to think that in five years this dark-haired 40-ish dashing artist will become the gray-haired worn-out businessman in “Executive Suite” (1954) - see previous post here.

That is perhaps another fun thing about this movie, the great romantic intrigue, the jealously and passion are all played out by middle-aged characters. By contrast, the young Janet Leigh, groomed by MGM and kept busy in a number of films at this point in her career, seems callow and less interesting.

Here, Mr. Pidgeon is ultimately still Greer’s hero. Perhaps we would be disappointed if he were not. Clem and Kay Miniver are ghosts in every movie in which Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon appeared together after “Mrs. Miniver.” This was, I think, the sixth of eight total movies. No matter how compelling the magnificent Errol was, even he couldn’t break up the team.

Errol and Greer at Luncheon

(Don’t forget to scroll down to the bottom of the page to pause the music so you can hear the video.)

Have a look at this footage from MGM’s silver anniversary luncheon, where “more stars than there are in the heavens” sat down to dine, newsreel cameras rolling. Some of you may remember this clip as part of “That’s Entertainment” (1974).

What especially caught my eye this time was dinner partners Errol Flynn and Greer Garson. I don’t know if the seating was arranged, but may well have been. It could have been about this time that Mr. Flynn and Miss Garson were shooting “That Forsyte Woman” (1949), though I don’t remember her costume from that movie. However, a little ways away at another table we see Walter Pidgeon, also starring in that same movie, and his outfit, and mustache, do resemble the character he played.

We’ll be discussing “That Forsyte Woman” this coming Thursday as the first of two films in which we’ll examine Errol’s success in a couple of non-Errol type roles. The second film will be next Monday, “Cry Wolf” (1947).

Have a look again at Errol and Greer. One notices immediately that they are completely aware they are on camera, but unlike many other stars at this occasion, pretend not to be aware. Notice the casual, but so on-the-mark posing each does, good side to the camera. This is a fascinating look into two people who are at ease, self confident, and knowledgeable about the tools of the trade, their stunning good looks.

For all their stardom and the posing, there is still something quite irresistibly genuine about the great lady and the swashbuckler as the camera passes by them. In “That Forsyte Woman”, they both play less magnificent people, and, just as in this luncheon clip, seem playfully aware of their own superb magnetism.

See you Thursday. And a Happy Thanksgiving today to our chums in Canada.