FORBIDDEN (1948)

 

By Gary Deane

 

Like carpeting in bathrooms, curry and chips, and the sport of cricket, some things British don't travel that well. You could add to the list the numbers of cheaply-made post-war Brit noirs, which would feature Hollywood actors ferried over in hope of adding some box office allure to the UK productions. George Raft, Dane Clark, Dennis O’Keefe, Alex Nichol, Dan Duryea, Arlene Dahl, Ginger Rogers, John Derek, Barbara Payton, Dana Wynter, Jayne Mansfield, and dozens of others would all have their moment on British screens.

However, the American presence did not always make for better pictures. Often, it did more harm than good, as it soon became evident that the imports were there just to be there. It also created a sense of cultural uncertainty around the films themselves. In the end, the foreign involvement underscored the conviction that many of the movies hadn’t been worth the effort to start with.

However, one B-feature notably strengthened by the involvement of an American was Forbidden (1948), a stylish noir thriller starring Douglass Montgomery, an actor born and raised in Los Angeles. Throughout the 1930s, Montgomery had featured opposite A-list actresses such as Joan Crawford and Katherine Hepburn. But after four years overseas during the war in the Canadian forces, he had become yesterday’s news.

Fortunately, things later took a turn for the better for the good-looking and affable Montgomery when he was cast in Forbidden as a once-promising Canadian research chemist, Jim Harding, who's now estranged from his vocation. Though married, he’s living emotionally and sexually apart from his wife and now is peddling patent medicine and hair restorer on a Blackpool promenade. There, he becomes attracted to one of the carny girls, Jeannie Thompson (Hazel Court), who spins candy floss at a nearby stall. Without telling her that he’s married, he begins an affair with Jeannie, something for which he might not be blamed.  

While not entirely a femme fatale, Harding’s wife, Diana (Patricia Burke), is still one of the more venomous females to be found in classic noir. A stage actress who is desperate to revive a failed career, Diana’s taken to sleeping with any punter she thinks might help her get back on the boards. At the same time, she refuses to give Jim a divorce, as he provides her with at least some degree of financial security. As she tells it, “Having a husband in the background at least gives me some choice”.

When a local spiv, Johnny (Kenneth Griffin, who specialized in playing lowlifes and weasels), tells Diana of Jim’s affair, she hunts down Jeannie, confronting and calling her “a fairground slut”, and saying, “Why don’t you stick to your own kind—or don’t they pay enough?”. When Jim hears about the run-in, he decides that is enough. Aware that Diana uses thyroid pills to control her weight, and with his background in chemistry, he calculates that he should be able to increase the dosage just enough to kill her without raising suspicion. Sticking to plan, he later returns home to find her dead, then buries her body under the slate tiles of his lab. That, of course, is just the beginning.  

Harding is not a character we should like. He's complacent, compromised at every turn, and maybe too ready to play the victim. And yet Montgomery persuades us to go along and to sympathize with Harding and his plight. Like Richard Basehart in He Walked by Night (1948), Montgomery takes a character from whom we’d rather keep our distance and manages to render him compelling.

The film’s two female leads, Hazel Court and Patricia Burke, provide a fascinating study in contrasts. Court, an actress with doll-like radiance, is affecting as a decent working-class girl who “knows her place”. As she says, “I tried looking up over the fence once. Now I’m in me own backyard and it suits me fine”. On the other hand, Burke’s hardened and hateful Diana is convinced she’s deserving of much more and that her place is elsewhere. However, she’s plainly just ‘mutton dressed up as lamb’. The only one who doesn’t know it is her.

Forbidden, atmospheric and unsettling, takes place mostly in the vicinity of the funfair, a natural gathering place for fast-buck artists, con men, grifters, and wide-boys like Johnny. Amusement parks are recurrent locations in film noir, arenas frequently portrayed as far more threatening than amusing. As told in flashback, Forbidden is all that. Crisply directed by George King (Crimes at the Dark House, 1940), The Shop at Sly Corner, 1947), with cinematography by Hone Glendinning (The Shop on Sly Corner, 1947, The Noose, 1948, and Shadow of the Past,1950), Forbidden is part of Odeon Entertainment’s ‘The Best of British Collection’.