THE CONSTANT NYMPH

Boyer and Fontaine

THE CONSTANT NYMPH (1943). Director: Edmund Goulding. 

This is considered a "lost" film because the rights to the novel, play and subsequent film have all been dispersed and lost over the years. While not the masterpiece I was hoping for, The Constant Nymph is still a good picture with much to recommend it. Lewis Dodd (Charles Boyer) is a modern composer whose work is not very appreciated by the critical establishment. His old friend, the composer Albert Sanger (Montagu Love), thinks that Dodd's music lacks heart and soul and won't become really great until Dodd cries (the old business of the artist must suffer). Sanger has three daughters, one of whom, Tessa (Joan Fontaine) is unrequitedly in love with Lewis. Eventually, after old Sanger's death, Lewis marries Tessa's cousin Florence (Alexis Smith) while Tessa and her sisters are sent to boarding school. But Tessa and her soul mate Lewis won't stay apart for long, leading to painful and romantic complications. 

The movie is handsomely produced (it uses one of the sets from The Old Maid), well-directed and very well acted, but it's perhaps too talky and soapy for its own good. Some will find it more sappy than moving. Whatever the case, Fontaine gives an exemplary performance; Boyer is fine if a notch below Fontaine. Charles Coburn is his usual excellent self as the sisters' Uncle Charles, and Peter Lorre offers his usual distinctive persona as a man who courts and marries Tessa's sister, Toni, well-played by Brenda Marshall. But the big surprise is that utterly gorgeous Alexis Smith gives perhaps the finest performance of her career as Florence, who's desperately afraid of losing the only man she's ever seriously been in love with. She manages to summon up as much emotional fireworks as Davis and Crawford at their best without quite going over the top. The movie has an interesting subtext of the war between romantic (melodious and emotional) and modern (dissonant and mathematical) music, and it's even more interesting that the film's excellent score was composed by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who composed operas in Vienna before fleeing the nazis and coming to America to "slum" for Hollywood. Korngold's music could be full of noisy, dissonant chords, but he decidedly composed in the romantic idiom. However, it wasn't realistic that Dodd's modern music would have been decried during the time the film takes place, as that's just when that type of music was becoming popular.  

Verdict: A highly interesting curiosity. ***.

STRANGE IMPERSONATION

STRANGE IMPERSONATION (1946). Director: Anthony Mann.

Nora Goodrich (Brenda Marshall) has developed a new anesthesia (although if it only lasts for an hour it can hardly be used in most operations), and wants to test it on herself. Unfortunately, she doesn't realize that her assistant Arline (Hillary Brooke) has much more sinister plans. Like something out of an EC horror story from the fifties, Nora is a good person whose life becomes embroiled in tragedy due to the nasty actions of another person. [Unfortunately, this film doesn't have a clever or exacting EC payoff; in fact the ending may make you groan.] Marshall, who was married to William Holden for thirty years, gives a good performance, as does Brooke in one of her most unsympathetic roles. William Gargan is fine in an unusual turn as a doctor who's in love with Nora, and Ruth Ford [Lady Gangster] is vivid as a drunk woman who walks into Nora's car and later becomes a nuisance and worse. Strange Impersonation has an interesting plot and some good twists, but it's distinctly minor and not well developed. Mary Treen appears as an overly cheerful nurse and Lyle Talbot is a homicide detective. Mann later directed The Furies with Barbara Stanwyck and many others. Marshall starred as Singapore Woman five years earlier.

Verdict: Fraught with possibilities but too cheap and minor-league. **.

SINGAPORE WOMAN

SINGAPORE WOMAN (1941). Director: Jean Negulesco.

A man sits in a café and across the room sees a figure out of his past: the beautiful daughter of a wealthy man who once helped him. He remembers the night he was at her house and she came running out of her bedroom, while behind her a rejected suitor blew his brains out. At the police station, the wife of the dead man tells the woman that she is ultimately responsible for her husband's death and now her own life will be cursed. In rapid succession, her father loses his fortune, her husband falls overboard and drowns, the gal hits rock bottom, and now this former femme fatale winds up a hopeless, pitiful, disheveled drunk in a tacky, rundown saloon in Singapore. Nevertheless, the young man (David Bruce) is mesmerized and decides to approach her ... That's the start of Singapore Woman and you'll either want to switch the channel or settle back and dig in for more. Despite the sudsy promise of the opening, you ultimately may want to choose the former option, because Singapore Woman turns out to be an okay but not very memorable South Asian remake of Bette Davis' Dangerous (itself no masterpiece), which garnered Davis what most consider a “pity” Oscar. In the Davis part, Brenda Marshall is perfectly swell, although not as –shall we say – vivid as Davis. David Bruce [in the Franchot Tone role} and the supporting cast also give it their all, and the programmer is well-directed by Negulesco, containing a certainly zesty bar fight scene. The film has a different ending from Dangerous however. [SPOILER ALERT: she stays with Bruce instead of returning to her not-so-dead husband.]

Verdict: Singapore Woman is a competent curiosity, all right; it just isn't anything special. **.