The Great Flamarion

Recently, I took out my Mill Creek ultra-cheap set of public domain "crime" movies, 50 movies in the set, to watch another movie. This time, it was The Great Flamarion.

You can already tell this is public domain considering the production company listed at the start of the credits is in a different typeface from the rest of the credits and badly edited in, to boot. But that's no big deal since I expect it from these cheap sets. Going through the credits, there was a screen listing "William Wilder" as the producer -- I actually had to back up and check to make certain it wasn't that Billy Wilder with a writing credit, maybe from something left over from his days before he became a director. But it turns out that the person is question is actually W. Lee. Wilder, a producer/director from the second half of the 1940s who was in fact the older brother of Billy Wilder. More promising is when we get to the director, a young Anthony Mann years before he started making those great westerns with James Stewart.

In any case, on to the story. Although the movie was released in 1945, we're told that it's 1936 in Mexico City. There's a vaudeville-like performance going on at a music-hall type place, surprisingly enough in English. But suddenly we hear what sounds like a gunshot, which understandably causes chaos. Backstage, Connie (Mary Beth Hughes), the wife of Eddie (Steve Barclay), is found dead with the gun right there. The fairly obvious suspect is Eddie, since the two had supposedly had an argument not long before the shooting.

However, two strange things happen. First is that the authorities determine that Connie was not shot to death; in fact she was strangled. And yet the gun did go off. That accounts for the second strange thing. After some time has passed, one of the stagehands is cleaning the stage, when suddenly he hears a loud thump just behind the curtain. He looks, and sees... The Great Flamarion (Erich von Stroheim). Flamarion is a nother performer in the show, and as he's dying, he starts relating the story of how he wound up here....

Go back some time to the vaudeville circuit. Flamarion was still Flamarion, doing his act, which was a trick shot act. No big deal, except that his act was a double, with Flamarion shooting things out from Connie, and other things just to the side of Connie. Technically, it's a triple, since the one time we see the act it starts with Connie having a tryst with Al (Dan Duryea), who is her husband in the "real life" context of the movie but the other man in the play-within-a-pay. Flamarion walks in on this and that when the shooting begins.

Now, when you see the name Dan Duryea in the credits, you should know that there's a character that's up to no good. In this case, it's a man who likes to drink and spend, to the point of selling off some of Connie's jewelry, which she's clearly unhappy about. He probably sees other women too, although that's not made explicit. In any case, Connie has been thinking about getting a divorce or otherwise breaking up the act, although the latter might be unfair to Flamarion. So she starts getting Flamarion to believe that perhaps she's really interested in him. Then, she starts putting the suggestion in Flamarion's mind that perhaps he could have an "accident" that kills Al.

The Great Flamarion is a B movie all the way, with a short running time and obviously low-budget sets and a storyline that had probably been done dozens of times already, even if this time it has the gloss of using a character created by Vicki Baum, better known for Grand Hotel. But it's a pretty darn stylish B movie, thanks in part to the direction of Mann, and pretty good turns by Hughes and von Stroheim.

If there were a good print available anywhere, The Great Flamarion is the sort of film that would be interesting for Eddie Muller to present on Noir Alley. As it is, however, you're going to have to find the many public domain copies.