POSTMARK FOR DANGER aka PORTRAIT OF ALISON (1955)

By Gary Deane

For some, there’s the country in which they were born, and then there’s the country in which they wish they’d been born.

British director Guy Green's country of choice was the United States – to the extent that it would not be England, but California, where he'd reside for forty years prior to his death in 2005. However, long before coming to the US, Green had made clear his affinity for both American actors and the more expansive Hollywood film style. 

Green began his film career as a cameraman, then director of cinematography who'd work on such classic British titles as The Way Ahead (1944), The Way to the Stars (1945), Oliver Twist (1948), and The Passionate Friends (1949). In 1947, he received an Academy Award for his filming of David Lean’s Great Expectations made the previous year.

Green's first assignment as a director was River Beat (1954), an involving crime thriller with American actress Phyllis Kirk embroiled in the investigation of a smuggling racket. He followed with several solid British B-noirs, including Tears for Simon (1956), Postmark for Danger (1956), Triple Deception (1958), The Snorkel (1959), S.O.S. Pacific (1960), and The Angry Silence (1961), all featuring US-born or naturalized actors. Among them was Stuart Whitman, who'd win an Academy Award nomination for The Mark (1962).

While still in England, Green helmed several large-scale American productions for MGM, including Light in the Piazza (1962) and Diamond Head (1965).  He then moved to the US to direct his best known film as a director, the interracial love story, A Patch of Blue (1967), which garnered a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Shelley Winters, plus four other nominations.   

More interesting to film noir audiences, however, is Green’s Postmark for Danger (aka Portrait of Alison, its British release title). Based on a novel by Francis Durbridge, creator of the Paul Temple series, Postmark is a tense Hitchcockian tale featuring double-crosses, a mistake in identity, and a comely female in trouble who’s rescued by a reluctant hero. It also comes with a McGuffin.  

Portrait artist Tim Forrester (Robert Beatty) learns from his brother Dave (William Sylvester), a charter pilot, that their younger brother Lewis, along with an American actress, Alison Ford (Terry Moore), has been killed in a car accident in Italy.  Both the Italian police and Scotland Yard, however, believe that Lewis, an investigative journalist, was murdered as a result of a story he was doing about an international diamond smuggling operation.  

The police are interested in a postcard that Lewis may have sent to Tim which might contain clues to the mystery. However, they become more involved when a) Tim's favorite model (Josephine Griffin) turns up dead in his apartment and b) he claims that Alison is alive and that she suspects her father to be part of the smuggling ring. Tim was once sought out by Alison’s father who had commissioned a painting of her. It was completed working from a photo in which she appears to be wearing the same dress as found on the dead model.

With distant echoes of Laura, Postmark for Danger unfurls in a tantalizing mist of eerie and unlikely coincidences, before settling in as a fraught police procedural based on a script by Ken Hughes. Green’s high-impact direction and the emphatic lensing of cinematographer Wilkie Cooper give Postmark for Danger its luminous look and feel, free of the kinds of restraints, both visual and dramatic, that can hobble British B noirs. It's also good to see fist fights that are staged and not choreographed. Postmark for Danger remains one of Guy Green’s most resilient films. 

However, after his moment in the Los Angeles sun with A Patch of Blue, Green went on the squander his reputation with The Magus, one of the most critically vilified films of all time. Green never recovered, becoming involved in other ill-considered projects such as Jacqueline Susann’s Once is Not Enough and a host of so-so made-for-television movies. Nevertheless, in 2004, the director was awarded the Officer of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth for his lifetime contributions and services to cinema. He would die the following year.

I, JANE DOE (1948)

By Gary Deane

“Whenever I‘m unhappy with a performance, I look through the TV Guide and try to find a Vera Hruba Ralston picture to watch," because I know, no matter how bad a performance I may have given, I could NEVER be as bad as she was!” Maureen Stapleton to Johnny Carson, 1962.

In the late 1940s and early ‘50s, Republic Studios wrote the book when it came to smart, well-crafted B thrillers, with I, Jane Doe one of its choicest chapters. In it, a mystery woman, ‘Jane Doe’ (played by the aforementioned Miss Ralston), is arrested for the murder of Stephen Curtis (John Carroll), recently returned to the US from service in France. Jane is brought to trial without information as to who she is, what her relationship with Curtis might have been, or any suspected motive for the killing. After refusing to speak in her own defense, she's convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to the electric chair. 

Circumstances later bring about a second trial in which some of the details of Jane’s story are revealed during the proceedings. As it turns out, Jane's new attorney, Eve Meredith Curtis (Ruth Hussey) is the wife of the man whom Jane is charged with having killed. Hence, her carefully orchestrated defense of Jane becomes a cause célèbre. The lawyer makes it clear she has her reasons, though it’s not apparent what they really are -- apart from her curious empathy for the accused. However, as the trial progresses, it becomes obvious that Stephen Curtis, were he not dead, would have a lot to answer for,  both to Jane Doe and his wife.

I, Jane Doe offers a surprisingly modern take on its female protagonists -- their sense of themselves, their place in the world, and their relationships with men and each other. Though the women carry the dramatic and moral weight in I, Jane Doe, sexual equality appears to be assumed. Eve Meredith is a sophisticated, successful Manhattan lawyer, with nothing more or nothing less made of that fact. Her assistant, Phyllis, is just as smart and has a wit not limited to wisecracks. While Jane's case is sad, she's not given to wearing the mantle of victimhood. Whatever she's done, she's acted out of conviction, justifiable or not.  

Equal parts romantic melodrama and noirish thriller, I, Jane Doe turns on a clever screenplay by Lawrence Kimble (San Quentin, 1946, Criminal Court, 1946, Mystery in Mexico, 1948). Kimble toiled in the Hollywood trenches for over three decades both in film and television, retiring with nearly 150 screenwriting credits under his belt. Nicknamed, ‘Nimble’, he was known for his imaginative plotting and penchant for adult dialog, both in evidence in I, Jane Doe. Though director John H. Auer (The Flame, 1948, City that Never Sleeps, 1953, Hell’s Half Acre, 1954) has directed more stylishly, he still knows how to tell a story.  

Oscar-nominated Ruth Hussey was well-suited to the role of Eve Curtis. Hussey brings the same unmannered crispness and charm that she did to movies for which she’s better known: The Philadelphia Story, 1940, The Uninvited, 1944, and The Great Gatsby, 1949. A persuasive actress, Hussey elevates I, Jane Doe with her certainty 

As for Vera Hruba Ralston, few Hollywood stars have ever suffered as much scorn. Her acting was wooden, her accent thick, and everyone in town knew she was married to the head of Republic Studios, Herbert J. Yates, who insisted on foisting her on an unwilling public as well as fellow actors. John Wayne, her co-star in The Fighting Kentuckian (1949), threatened to leave the studio if ever forced to work with her again. Sterling Hayden reportedly demanded and received a healthy bonus to appear opposite her in Timberjack in 1955. However, to her credit, the Czech-born Ralston was cooperative, hardworking, and eager to please; over time, her acting improved. Though she's emotional and weepy in I, Jane Doe, it’s because the part asks her to be. And, as Annette Dubois (Jane’s real name) is a foreigner, Ralston’s accent isn't as distracting. There are no grounds for conviction on that count. 

Rounding things out is Adele Mara as a brassy showgirl, Marga-Jane Hastings, who goes to see Eve about a breach of promise suit against a man, at first unnamed -- though we have our suspicions. Right off, she's told that such suits are not legal in the state. Mara, playing her part to the hilt, responds, “You mean a guy can take me around, tell me he’s not married, promise me the moon with a blue ribbon around it, get me to quit my job so he can spend more time with me, and then just kiss me and not pay for it? I don’t believe it!”

However, I, Jane Doe finishes with a bravura, operatic reckoning -- and the satisfaction that comes with seeing everyone, for better or worse, getting exactly what they deserve. C'est la vie, c'est le noir.

Gary Deane

ESCAPE (1948)

"There is nothing more tragic in life than the utter impossibility of changing what you have done"  

John Galsworthy


An improbable, pedestrian fugitive-on-the-run story, 'Escape' is saved by the appeal of its English-born leads 'Sexy Rexy' Harrison and Peggy Cummins, now enshrined for her part as the fetishistic femme fatale in 'Gun Crazy'.

Matt Denant (Harrison) is sent to jail for three years for the assault and inadvertent killing of a police officer. Dora Winton (Cummins) offers Denant both the benefit of the doubt and her only too-willing assistance after his escape from prison.

Harrison is his usual disarmingly louche self and Cummins is engaging as the headstrong young woman. Also good is William Hartnell as a police inspector, a part he played to great effect in countless British crime dramas.

Based on a play by John Galsworthy, 'Escape' also benefits from a literate script that offers a thoughtful meditation on justice and its sometimes difficult and uneven administration.

In the end though, the parts don't come close to adding up to a whole. Directed by Joseph. L. Mankeiwicz, 'Escape' deserved to be a bigger picture but ended up writ small, unable to overcome its theatrical origins and dictating lack of passion. 

Pity, that.