Strange Bargain - 1949

“Strange Bargain” (1949) is film noir stepping out of the shadows and into the living room. It’s a great example of what happens when middle America adopts a new fad, tames it, and makes it into something quick, convenient, easily digestible, and appropriate for family audiences. Noir as mainstream entertainment.

It’s not the first time we have suburban America as a scene of the crime and a haven for criminals, Alfred Hitchcock’s “Shadow of a Doubt” (1943) is a great example of this. “Strange Bargain” doesn’t have the eeriness, or the humor of “Shadow”, but it’s not meant to copy Hitchcock; it’s meant to cash in on a powerful new tide in movie making of the day.

No back alleys, no dames or molls, no whackos or mobs, or lonely car trips on deserted highways, here. Oh sure, we’re in Los Angeles, but not that Los Angeles. The movie begins innocuously with a paperboy riding his bike down a cozy suburban street, flinging the newspaper at a smiling Jeffrey Lynn, the master of the house on his sunny front porch. It looks like Andy Hardy’s neighborhood. All is right with the world. Not for long.

We quickly meet Mr. Lynn’s family at breakfast: the supportive homemaker wife played by Martha Scott who never gets to sit down and eat, the precocious son who wants a new bike but can’t have one because Pop doesn’t make enough money and they’re behind the bills.

The boy is played by Michael Chapin, whose know-it-all chatter gets on one’s nerves after about 30 seconds. Younger daughter, played by Arlene Gray, who never made a movie after this, is easier on the ears, and she gives her annoying big brother some fantastic glares.

Martha Scott tells Jeffrey Lynn he should ask the boss for a raise. When he screws up the nerve and does, he gets fired.

Jeffrey Lynn, so even tempered in this role, comes off as an extremely passive character, but there are moments when his quiet reactions are quite moving. The first is when he asks for the raise, fingering the telephone cords on the two phones on his boss’s desk nervously, and then, sitting in a chair to hear the bad news, his shocked expression and low, hoarse “Fired?”

Here is a footnote to the character and a signpost to the era: “I’ve been with the firm 12 years. I guess I expected to spend the rest of my life here.” It’s a sentence both pitiable and enviable, from our economic perspective.

But the horrors are not over this day for our Mr. Lynn. The boss takes him for drinks after work, and we see that he did not intend to fire Mr. Lynn out of animosity or poor job performance. The company is broke. The boss is broke. But, he has a plan to help them both. The boss is played by Richard Gaines, who we last saw as the hysterical boor Mr. Pendergast in “The More the Merrier.” He also played an officious snob, but less comical, in “The Enchanted Cottage” which we reviewed here. Gaines was just as good at drama as he was at comedy, but his role is small in this film.

He dies.

Mr. Gaines’ plan, as laid out to his horror-stricken employee Jeffrey Lynn, is to kill himself for his insurance money. That will get his family out of debt and provide for his widow and high-school aged son. Gaines asked Lynn’s help to make his suicide look like murder, so the insurance company will pay off. He offers Lynn $10,000 to do this.

Of course, Lynn refuses, but later that evening the boss calls him at home, tells him the plan is going into action. Jeffrey Lynn rushes over to the boss’s mansion to try to talk him out of it. Too late. Body on the floor. He has no choice now. He must make it look like murder or the widow and son will be left with nothing.

Here we have the film noir element of a man caught in a web of deceit and treachery which he did not devise, but to which he consented, and he must try and backpedal his way out. Except, he just gets deeper and deeper.

Where we part company with more edgy film noir movies is the constant reminder Jeffery Lynn is not a stranger in a strange land; he is on home turf. He is as rooted to his suburban community as the tree in his front yard. He is not alienated from society; he is society. I like the mention of his kids going to the neighbors’, who have a TV, to watch wrestler and early TV superstar Gorgeous George. It’s also a cute bit when the daughter, lying on the living room rug, playing with her movie star trading cards, “I traded Cary Grant to Mary for a Dick Powell and Jane Greer. Gee, I hope I didn’t make a mistake.”

Meanwhile, the boy kneels in front of his dad’s chair, reading the back side of his dad’s newspaper. I remember doing that. Young Michael is fascinated by murder and delights in the thought of the police giving the murderer, “a one-way ticket to the gas chamber.”

His wife and his know-it-all boy play a Greek chorus, innocently haunting Lynn about how terrible the event is, and how the famous police detective will hunt down suspects and find the truth. (Later she passes a kinder judgment on her husband, “You’re a man and men are always making mistakes.” And then to soften the blow, adds, “Even women make them, sometimes.” Quite a concession on her part; that’s not something we women usually let on.)

Jeffrey Lynn’s expression of horror has long since turned to one of sickening dread. It’s a race to see if he can keep from falling completely apart before the end of the movie. Every sound, every passing headlight makes him flinch. The cat jumping off a shelf just about gives him a heart attack. Grimly, he wipes the blood off his hat brim, his steering wheel, his hands.

The famed, dogged police detective is played by Harry Morgan, and in a coincidence that has to make anybody smile, is named Lt. Webb.

We are not-too-subtly set up from the beginning of the movie that Lynn is falling into the no-way-out of most noir films, but gradually the film turns a different direction and becomes a traditional mystery. This occurs from clues we are allowed to discover partly through Harry Morgan’s interviews with everybody who is associated with the deceased, and party through Jeffery Lynn’s own open and sympathetic personality that makes everybody come to him with their concerns.

He becomes a surrogate father figure to the boss’s son, who has a piece of information he withheld from the police. The widow wants Lynn to run the firm, even though he is only an assistant bookkeeper because she distrusts the boss’s business partner. The business partner also latches on to Mr. Lynn and offers him a promotion.

We discover hidden motives, and lies, and most importantly…and most surprisingly…we discover it wasn’t suicide. The boss really was murdered.

Jeffery Lynn, despite his passive demeanor, is a noble, staunch Samaritan in his sympathy and his unwillingness to finger any of the usual suspects. He worries about everybody, even though he is suspect number one.

We slide back into the realm of traditional noir with the traditional flashback telling the solution.

But the solution didn’t stick, evidently. Some of you “Murder She Wrote” fans will remember the episode from 1987 called “The Days Dwindle Down” where Jessica Fletcher solves a continuation of this case. Among the notable guest stars in this episode were Jeffrey Lynn, Martha Scott, and Harry Morgan reprising their roles from 38 years previously.  Like true film noir, the flashbacks, and the trouble, never ends.

The Howards of Virginia (1940)

“The Howards of Virginia” (1940) is one of not-very-many movies Hollywood made about the American Revolution. It’s a good effort in some respects, and fails dismally in others, but that may be not just to acting or direction. Sometimes our failure in being able to interpret a particular era in the past may be our own tenuous grasp on what it really was like. We’re not really as good at turning back the clock as we think we are. It’s just not that easy.

The story is one of those span-of-years tales, in this case from the boyhood of lead character Matt Howard, played by Cary Grant, when his father was killed fighting Indians when Virginia was under British rule during the French and Indian War, to Matt’s adulthood as a solider of the young Continental Army fighting to end British rule during the Revolutionary War.

The costumes mostly are pretty good (except for the wedding dress, too modern), and so are the hairstyles, the sets, and furniture. Some care went into the making of this film, and it is impressive that part of the filming was actually done in Williamsburg, Virginia. So far, so good.

But I wonder if sometimes planting a story against an historical backdrop, and using that backdrop only as kind of puppet show stage scenery and not as an organic element to drive the story is kind of like having a canvas with a beautiful landscape on it and then painting stick figures in the foreground. They stand out badly and it’s hard to appreciate the pretty background anymore because all your eye can focus on is those stupid stick figures.

Our chief stick figure here is Cary Grant. Some have called him miscast in this movie, and maybe he was, but I have to wonder if half the problem is just the way the character was written. Grant seems to be pretty one-dimensional, buffoonish and Always! Seems! To! Talk! In! Exclamation! Points!

Cary Grant spends the entire movie shouting, not in anger or with passion, but just normal every day speech. Hello becomes HELLO!!!! His hyperkinetic overacting is a distraction, and rather fatiguing to watch after a while.

Martha Scott plays the well-born lady this frontier fool pines for, and though it would seem her sedateness and dignity might soften Mr. Grant’s explosive personality, it doesn’t really. Sometimes she seems a bit remote with little warmth.

The best performer here for my money is Sir Cedric Hardwicke, who plays her elder brother, the snobbish family patriarch who looks down on Grant. When the Revolution begins, he is a Tory, or would be if there were any profit in it, and he provides a fascinating contrast to Cary Grant. Mr. Hardwicke’s scenes are absorbing, and we discover many layers to this character in a way we never do with Mr. Grant’s character. Hardwicke is noble, self centered, disdainful, and ultimately tragic. So is Grant’s character, but we may find ourselves understanding Grant less and disliking him more.

Cary Grant takes Martha Scott out to the western lands of Virginia in the Shenandoah Valley to carve out a home in the wilderness, but a home similar to the mansion she left behind in elegant Williamsburg. Their new mansion goes up with remarkable speed. It’s nice to see Anne Revere in a brief role as a frontier neighbor lady. Nobody could pull the job off better than she.

These scenes are reminiscent to “Drums Along the Mohawk” (1939) which we discussed last year, but the leap Martha Scott has to take to make a life here with the rustic folk is much greater than the adjustment Claudette Colbert had to make. For one, we may understand that Miss Colbert’s character is likewise from a background more genteel than frontier husband Henry Fonda’s. But her genteel heritage is likely based on commerce. Colbert’s family from the northern colony of New York and New England derived their social superiority from trade.

Martha Scott isn’t just rich. She’s aristocratic. The caste system of Olde England transplanted itself in Virginia and the southern states in a way it never much did in New England, which was the repository of outcast Pilgrims and Puritans bent not on copying life in England but forging a new society where they would be top dog…a level of superiority they would have never achieved back in the old country.

However, aristocratic Scott stands by her man in buckskins and may look horrified at smelly backwoodsmen, but her very acquiescence to this life seems more democratic than someone in her position would actually be. It is the first indication that we are leading to a message of how wonderfully democratic this country is, and was. It’s a nice sentiment, but largely a fairy tale.

Also, the affable Thomas Jefferson, played by Richard Carlson, who is Matt Howard’s lifelong friend was not so affable and hail-fellow-well-met in real life. This shy, reclusive man, though he wrote one of the most noble documents ever penned - The Declaration of Independence - was also an aristocrat who disdained the company of lower-born folk he saw mainly in terms of rabble. This is certainly no crime and is not unusual in anyone well born and well educated. But, we may conclude he is re-drawn here to suit our World War II -era sensibilities.

Then we come to the first disgruntled rumblings of American discontent during all the repressive taxes the Crown placed on the colonies, and we see that Cary Grant has won a seat in the House of Burgesses, Virginia’s lower legislative house, where we are treated to snippets of speeches by Thomas Paine, played by Richard Gaines. Again, just as we discussed a few weeks ago about historical symbols in “Gone with the Wind” (1939), we have a schoolroom quick survey of American taglines as history through Paine’s words. Give me liberty or give me death. You remember that one.

This kind of use of slogans to represent eras does nothing to increase our understanding of an era, but only serves to confirm what we already think we know.

We might note here, however, a difference, though a subtle difference, in the treatment of the colonial African-American experience to what we observed in “Gone with the Wind”. The servants in the grand homes of course are all slaves, and one female slave goes with Martha Scott when the newlyweds strike out for the frontier. She is even more appalled at the rough backwoods people than Miss Scott is, and looks down on them as not being “quality”.

We don’t see too much of Dicey through the movie, she’s not Scott’s constant companion in life the way Hattie McDaniel’s “Mammy” was with Scarlett O’Hara, but we observe she deports herself with every bit as much high-born dignity as does Miss Scott. None of the slaves depicted in this film come off as caricature.

Still, it might be argued by some that the few dismissive glimpses we are given of the slaves indicate this is another example of Hollywood’s racism. I don’t think so, not entirely in this case, and for two reasons. First, the movie isn’t about the slave experience, it’s about the blustering Matt Howard. (Though for my money, a little less shouting Cary Grant and little more soft spoken Dicey might have made it a more interesting movie.)

Second, there is an interesting dramatic dynamic we can see here if we look for it. We learn about the slaves’ place in the world even by their diminished film presence. Just by viewing them in the background, we see how marginalized their lives are, how controlled their lives are, how little credence they were given by both Colonial America and by 1940s Hollywood.

I believe this effect here was unintended, the by-product of an era in Hollywood filmmaking. However, it was used on purpose with great success, if you remember, in the British television series “Upstairs/Downstairs.” We get to know the servants best when they have their scenes “below stairs” in the kitchen or servants’ dining hall. Here they are animated and effusive.

Then, when the bell rings and the butler Hudson, played by Gordon Jackson, goes upstairs to the morning room to answer the summons, the camera, the story, and mood shifts to the upper class family by whom the servants are employed. We are now treated to a scene of what is going on in the masters’ lives, and Gordon Jackson, grog tray in hand, stands in the background and blends in with the wall. Suddenly, the man we thought we knew so much about, with such a strong personality downstairs, becomes a stranger, an enigma to us. It tells us all we need to know about his place in society.

So it is with Dicey and her fellow servants. We get a brief look into her feelings and sensibilities, and then the door slams shut when the focus is back on her owners. It may not be satisfying to the audience who want to know more about her, but it is dramatically effective and historically accurate.

(I wish American television could turn out a product as good as “Upstairs/Downstairs” with similar subject matter. We have a lot of history to dabble in, if only we weren’t so lazy about depicting it in more than just convenient slogans and taglines, and not being willing to spend more money than it would take to put on a “reality” or talent contest shows, or fear being too historically accurate, thereby “losing” an uninformed general audience, or otherwise fear of offending modern sensibilities by being too accurate.)

Besides, a better evidence of Hollywood’s racism is that Libby Taylor, who played Dicey, spent a couple of decades playing maids and ladies’ room attendants.

Another subplot to the film is Cary Grant’s relationships with his sons. The younger, James, played as a young man by Tom Drake, is the apple of his eye. He ignores the older one, Peyton, because Peyton was born with a foot deformity, much like his brother-in-law, Cedric Hardwicke, whom Grant despises. When the child is born and Mr. Grant first sees his baby’s deformity, he suddenly refuses to name him after his father, but adamantly insists he be given her maiden name instead, branding him as an issue from her side of the family. Grant finally bonds with his son Peyton, played by Phil Taylor, when the lad performs a heroic act as a soldier during the Revolution.

The films ends, or we should say, tries to wrap itself up, with the astonished Grant recognizing a quality in his son even more important than his heroism. He observes that young Peyton, though ignored and dismissed his whole life as less worthy, is a kind and gentle person with no hatred in his heart. Grant declares to Martha Scott that their boy represents a new kind of person for the new nation they are founding, the best of both their worlds.

It’s a nice sentiment, and a wonderful goal to reach for, the idea that this republic may ever keep itself righted by the presence of kind, heroic people with no hatred in their hearts and the ability to forgive. It was an important message to send during the early years of World War II when the United States was not yet involved, but surely feared it probably would be before too long. We never quite seem to reach that placid plateau of good fellowship.

Williamsburg, where parts of this movie was filmed, was the capitol of Virginia until about 1780, when the capitol was moved to Richmond, in part at the recommendation of Thomas Jefferson. The town which had contributed so much to the political and cultural heritage of Colonial Virginia sort of became a quaint, gentle, and ignored (like young Peyton Howard), hamlet until about the 1920s, when Reverend Dr. W.A.R. Goodwin of the Bruton Parish Church got together with philanthropist John D. Rockefeller, Jr. to restore some of the historic buildings. We owe those two gentlemen a lot.

This project grew through the years, and now takes up nearly 85 percent of the original town, a beautifully restored living history museum, called Colonial Williamsburg. It is well worth a visit, and should be on the list of anybody with an interest in American history.

For more on Colonial Williamsburg, have a look at this website.

Happy Independence Day. Pace yourself eating those burgers and dogs.