Daily Archives: December 26, 2016

The Scapegoat
Directed by Robert Hamer
Written by Robert Hamer and Gore Vidal from a novel by Daphne Du Maurier
1959/UK/USA
Du Maurier-Guinness
First viewing/YouTube

[box] John Barratt: Fate has made a beautiful mistake and we are together when we might have been apart.[/box]

I was looking forward to seeing Alec Guinness in a dual role, and he is great as usual, but the movie left me a bit cold.

Jack Barrett (Guinness) is a bored, lonely, depressed professor of French at a provincial English university.  While on his annual vacation to France, he meets his double Jacques de Gue (also Guinness) in a bar.  Other than physically, Count de Gue is the Englishman’s polar opposite.  He spends most of the night pumping Barrett with questions and plying him with liquor.  Barrett, who is not accustomed to drinking much, quickly gets very drunk.  De Gue takes him back to his hotel, where he drugs his nightcap.  In the morning, de Gue and all of Barrett’s possessions are gone.  De Gue’s chauffeur arrives and, believing a telegram stating that his master has developed schizophrenia, tricks Barrett to going to the count’s chateau.

Barrett can’t convince even de Gue’s own mother (Bette Davis) or wife that he is who he says he is.  After awhile, he begins to play along and to enjoy life in the highly dysfunctional household and with the Count’s mistress.  Turns out that the family and girlfriend actually like de Gue’s new “personality” far more than his usual one.  Barrett sets about trying to rectify some of de Gue’s bigger sins. Before he can settle in too far, however, the reason for the deception becomes evident and Barrett is in bigger trouble than he dreamed.

Guinness is fine in a rather serious dual role, giving his characters nuanced differences rather than painting with comedy’s broad brush.  The story, on the other hand, is a bit too gimmicky for my taste and drags through the set up to a rushed and unsatisfying ending.

Trailer – spoilers

Sapphire
Directed by Basil Dearden
Written by Janet Green and Lukas Heller
1959/UK
Artna Films/The Rank Organization
First viewing/FilmStruck

[box] Superintendent Robert Hazard: We didn’t solve anything, Phil. We just picked up the pieces.[/box]

I enjoyed this both as a mystery and as a glimpse of race relations in late ’50’s Britain.

Before the credits roll, we see the body of a young woman dumped in a park.  Scotland Yard begins to work the case with hardly a shred of evidence.  When a student at the Royal Academy of Music turns up missing, they have their victim, Sapphire.  Classmates lead the investigators to her brother and her boyfriend.  The brother, a doctor, arrives from Birmingham.  It is then that they discover the brother is black and that Sapphire had been passing as white.  Soon after, an autopsy reveals that she was pregnant.

The boyfriend is white and discovered the truth about Sapphire’s heritage at about the time he learned she was pregnant.  He was the great hope of his bigoted working class family and will lose a scholarship to study architecture in Rome if he marries.  Nonetheless, the family claims they supported the marriage.  None of this rings true to the investigators. At the same time, they are following up leads to Sapphire’s former boyfriends in the black community.  With Bernard Miles as the boyfriend’s father.

This is a pretty good who-done-it.  I thought I had the perpetrator spotted for the entire film and was proved wrong – a plus in my book.  The movie does feel a bit stretched out by obvious red herrings but it works.  The more interesting aspect is the gamut of views on race portrayed in the film, including those of blacks.  One of the investigators finds it almost impossible to stay objective but there are plenty of other more tolerant folk, including the other investigator. It’s not a masterpiece or anything, but if the topic appeals I would say go for it.

Sapphire won the BAFTA award for Best British Film.

Clip