anna_wing

Of his foreshortened filmography, David Farrar was right to class Cage of Gold (1950) with his three films for Powell and Pressburger. He would never again be as luscious onscreen as he had been as the louche and irresistibly uninterested Mr. Dean of Black Narcissus (1947) or even as bitterly vulnerable as the self-dodging Sammy Rice of The Small Back Room (1949), but neither had he been asked to splash out his saturnine charm like Bill Glennon, the cornucopia of post-war shadow sides who fascinates this Ealing blend of domestic and underworld noir even when it knows, like his string of cross-Channel women, better.
 
Even in his era's extensive catalogue of damaged veterans, Bill is a disturbing shape-shifter, a violet-eyed spiv who can sit for his medal-ribboned portrait only half ironically as "St George, World War Two." Airmen were so heroized during the war itself, it feels like an especially provocative tilt at a generation of odeon myths to leave uncomfortably open whether this decorated wing commander became a crook after the war because it damaged him too badly to settle to civvy street or whether he made such a successful flyer because he was an amoral adrenaline junkie to begin with and whether it even matters when the results either way are this gorgeous, destructive, at once worldly and immature man. "I ask about your plans, you make a joke about the atom bomb." He romances the gamine artist of Jean Simmons' Judith Murray in a whirl of air shows and nights on the town as if incarnating the RAF-struck fantasies of her adolescence and leashes the cosmopolitan chanteuse of Madeleine Lebeau's Marie Jouvet with a bluntly demon lover's alternation of vanishing acts and the most incredible sex. The jeweled wristwatch that circulates among them does more than symbolize his inconstant attentions, it underscores his loose-ended opportunism, the streak of nihilism in his pleasure-seeking that can distract itself mid-scheme with a tastier prospect and cut and run from either at a moment's expedience. "Sweetheart, to live you have to have money. If your only trade is shooting down aeroplanes, you have to make it the best way you can." In the age of the welfare state, he's a creature of the unrepentant war, inseparable from its reckless glamour and threat: James Donald as the romantically second-run Dr. Alan Kearn labors with thankless conscientiousness for the future of the nascent NHS, but the blackout dazzle of Bill never appears except out of one past or another, the repressed on a perma-return ticket. What's the Time? glowed the legend of the world clock at Piccadilly Circus underneath which he was introduced transacting some elliptically clipped business that in hindsight cannot have been remotely legit, considering that bigamy and blackmail comprise merely two of his offhand income streams. His last words which for a twist sound like true ones will reach us through the spectral double exposure of memory. Of course his talent for inconvenient reappearance includes from the dead. Farrar had such bodily presence as an actor, Bill can't be too ghostlike when his dark-tousled, tweed-slouched figure commands the most venal conversations with the look of a raffish don, but he is elusive for such a comprehensive rotter, never once given the socially soothing out of a psychological explanation or even a total write-off. Just as it would have been nicer of the film to smooth the anxieties of his criminal present by revealing a past to match, it's nastier of it to suggest that he may retain some real feeling for the woman he's improvised into a badger game, which doesn't make it untrue. "Judy and I have a thing for each other that takes some breaking. We always had. You should know that."
 
Cage of Gold was produced and directed by the indispensable Michael Relph and Basil Dearden and while its preoccupation with the war's ambivalent legacy could be taken to point toward the social problem cycle for which their post-war collaborations became best known, it's also a fluid and full-tilt showcase for the British noir style. The screenplay by Jack Whittingham hinges its split modes so cleverly together—a criss-cross of perspectives that could each have formed their own, more conventional crime melodrama—that the film can't help but deflate when it converts in its last fifteen minutes into a much more forthright procedural with the introduction of Bernard Lee's Inspector Gray, but until then it seems to delight in laying down one immaculately expressionist set-up after another like the surge of commuters that sluices a pair of not yet lovers into one another's fateful, Tube-crowded arms. The elfin legend of Léo Ferré accompanies the star attraction of La Cage d'Or within a self-referentially gilded set that turns by dressed-down day into a vorticist rattan of shadows. The lid of an overboiled kettle chatters like the tremble of a pistol whose barrel telescopes with the steam-shriek into the circular blare of an impatient car horn. Even locations as familiarly establishing as the Albert Bridge or the Arc de Triomphe can flip in the hard-lit lens of DP Douglas Slocombe into a luminous mews of fog or an implicitly chthonic gate, as fast as the whip-timed cutting of Peter Tanner can slam a telephone's last word on the emptily curling smoke of a suicide. An abortion is discussed as frankly as the sign in a register office wearily requests, "Confetti must not be used in these premises." The joke about the wireless that pits the Third Programme against "comics and crooners" has faded to period detail, but it still feels sharp for Judy's stomach to turn at the gleefully untouchable misdeeds of Mr. Punch. The supporting cast of Herbert Lom, Harcourt Williams, Gladys Henson, and Grégoire Aslan occasionally feel heavyweight for their screen time, but Simmons offers more than a beautiful target as her pixieish innocence slowly cools and Lebeau is stealthily less decorative than her devoted role, though the demands of reliable virtue leave Donald with little to show until he's caught polishing the prints off a crime scene. With one speculatively raked brow, Farrar dominates and he should, magnetically troubling, unresolved to the end. "She had everything I ever really wanted except money." I am in the wrong region for the restored Blu-Ray, but it's not unwatchable on the Internet Archive and certainly clearer than it looked on the former TVTime where I discovered it four years ago and it seemed to have been heavily stepped on. Even so, not unlike its antihero, it haunted me. This thing brought to you by my wanted backers at Patreon.

I have spent the literal entirety of my legally adult life watching the country I was born into try to fait accompli its way into Armageddon and I have to say that it was not an enticing novelty a quarter of a century ago, either.