The Falcon and the Co-eds

William Clemens had an undistinguished career in Hollywood during the 1940s, but in 1943 he directed a minor masterpiece. Wanda Hale in the New York Daily described The Falcon and the Co-eds as ‘the most amusing and baffling’ of what was a series of RKO detective movies, starring first George Sanders and then Tom Conway. Film writer Doug McClelland felt that ‘everybody seemed to be trying a little harder than usual’. It is the finest of the series and no accident, I think, that one of the co-writers of the films screenplay was Ardel Wray, who also wrote I Walked with a Zombie (1943) and The Leopard Man (1943) (directed by Jacques Tourneur) and also Isle of the Dead (1945) (Mark Robson), which were part of producer Val Lewton's classic cycle of horror movies for RKO. The Falcon and the Co-eds has the same kind of ambiance as those films, with atmosphere and suspense created with small details: haunting and melodic music, the sound of crickets in a lush garden at night, the wind rustling through the trees like a voice. McClelland noted that from the very start it felt like a different enterprise to the rest of the Falcon series: ‘even the opening credits, a lovely, semi-slow motion pounding surf against which the names fell, was indicative of the quality approach’.

The plot is a nonsense: the Falcon (Tom Conway) is asked by the daughter of a friend to come to her college, Bluecliff Seminary, near the small coastal town of Three Coves to investigate the death of a professor. Although this is dismissed as a heart attack, it had been predicted, rather mystically, by another student Marguerita (Rita Corday). Despite the initial scepticism of the staff, it soon becomes clear a number of murders are being committed, following the death of the dean Miss Keyes (Barbara Brown), which is also foreseen. The prime suspect is another teacher Vicky Gaines played by Jean Brooks (she appears in six of the Falcon films, although this is by far her most impressive role in the series), who appears to be caught up in a whole raft of incestuous relationships within the faculty. The overriding mood of The Falcon and the Co-eds is one of strangeness; Tom Lawrence jokes with an undertaker and rides around in a horse and cart with three sisters who talk in unison; there is a weird sense of the occult as Marguerita’s predictions of death become true; and there are the hugely atmospheric scenes set at the Devil’s Ladder, a pathway leading down from a cliff edge. To get a true feel of how odd it all is, listen to this conversation between Conway and Brooks as they stand looking out at the ocean

BROOKS: I can’t explain the sense of freedom it gives me. I watch the waves beating to the shore and I wonder if nature is putting on a show just for me, to let me know how powerful she can be.

CONWAY: It seems lonely to me…wind and sea…sort of lost, as though there was searching for something.

BROOKS: Who isn’t?

The haunting aura of the film is most evident in one of the penultimate scenes. The wind has picked up, a storm is brewing. The Falcon notices that Marguerita, the student who had foreseen what would happen, has walked away from a crowd gathering around the body of the Dean. He follows her through the grounds of the college towards a set of French doors which open out onto the lawn. We can hear melancholy, yet dramatic, piano music playing. The camera moves through the doors, the shadow of tree branches falling on them, and into a low lit room. Marguerita sits by a record player, listening to the music intently. A strange conversation ensues between her and the Falcon; she asks him to listen to the wind in the trees to hear what is saying; we can almost hear a voice. The effect is hypnotic – both for the character and the audience. It’s an entrancing sequence and the film deserves to be better known. Clemens’s other work is not widely available, although another very enjoyable film Nancy Drew – Reporter (1939) can be viewed here.

British Films 1: Seven Days To Noon

Part of The Knowledge’s brief is to draw attention to those films, particularly British ones from the 1940s and 50s, which have been somewhat neglected. The scenes of a dazed Cillian Murphy walking through a deserted London in Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later are among the most fascinating and terrifying of that film; the idea that in today’s 24 hour, bustling, metropolis, a single person walking the streets is so eerie and out of the norm. A similar effect – in some ways more extraordinary given when it was made - comes in the climatic scenes of the Boulting Brothers’ Seven Days To Noon (1950), released for the first time on DVD earlier this year. The city has been evacuated, various shots showing how empty it is, with the silence only broken by the footsteps of the army searching for Professor Willingdon (Barry Sloane). Seven days before hand, the Professor had threatened to blow up London with a stolen bomb unless the Government agreed to stop all funding and investigation into nuclear weapons, something they can never acquiesce to. The direction by John Boulting and the pace and editing of the sequence creates a genuine tension. It is somehow made all the more chilling when compared to the opening scene of the film, with its cosy and utterly everyday image of a postman going about his business, bringing the letter of this warning to the door of 10 Downing Street.

Much of Seven Days To Noon has not dated well; like It Always Rains On Sunday (1947) and Passport To Pimlico (1949), it shows Britain in the age of austerity that followed the war – strangely coy and cloistered while deeply insecure and uncertain about the future. For the most part the characters are either stiff, upper lip types or salt of the earth cockneys. But in the central figure of anti hero Professor Willingdon, we have someone much more complicated and less easy to define; clearly not a well man, his plan of action is irrational and misguided, yet his thesis that the world would be better off without these kinds of weapons isn’t hard to sympathise with. In the Cold War era the film tapped into the nuclear fear in the wake of Hiroshima and the developing arms race. Although these threats are a thing of the past, the continuing global uncertainty means that many of the issues and arguments in the film still speak to us. So while the film is certainly a social document, almost by accident a reflection of an age and values that simply don’t exist any more, it is somewhat more than that; a thriller of great subtlety and ambiguity, raising uncomfortable questions and not very reassuring answers.

The story by James Bernard and Paul Dehn won an Academy Award and arguably created the archetypal plot of a villain threatening to destroy or hurt people within a certain time limit; it could be said that Die Hard, 24, Speed, Juggernaut and the rest all follow in the wake of Seven Days To Noon. Like Carol Reed’s great run of films of the late 1940s (Odd Man Out, The Fallen Idol and The Third Man), Seven Days to Noon is the middle part of a Boulting Brothers trilogy, between Brighton Rock (1947) and The Magic Box (1950), which will hopefully now be discovered by a whole new audience.

And while we're on Jack Rosenthal...

For those who haven’t come across his work, Jack Rosenthal was a British television writer from the 1960s until the 2000s, one of the finest of a generation which included Jim Allen, Alan Bennett, Alan Plater and Dennis Potter. A unique mixture of poignancy and humour, the overriding theme of his work (The Evacuees, Bar Mitzvah Boy, The Knowledge, P'Tang, Yang, Kipperbang, Eskimo Day etc) was a journey of self discovery; often the protagonist or protagonists were teenagers or children going through a rite of passage: having to leave home for the first time, going to war, facing puberty, carving out a career. His subject was life and the fact that it is largely bittersweet. Rosenthal never offered simple archetypes; his characters could be said to echo Jean Renoir’s assertion that ‘everybody has his reasons'. On a personal note, I became intensely and emotionally involved in the world he created, which is perhaps why I felt his death in 2004 as keenly if I had known him. The work should still be seen and his autobiography is one of the best of its kind.

Rosenthal’s status as an artist raises some interesting questions, however, which are worth pausing over. He wrote his plays for television and the debate over whether the small or the large screen is the best continues to this day. Meanwhile there is also the issue of authorship; whose voice can we say is the overriding one within a work? In theatre and television, that person is, for the most part, the writer, in film, the director. The Knowledge believes that Rosenthal was certainly the auteur of his art and that the boundaries between ‘the box’ and the cinema have never been as rigid as has been made out. In terms of motion pictures, the masterpieces of the past ten years are just as likely to be judged The Wire, The Sopranos or Doctor Who as they are Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Hidden or The Lives of Others. Of the last thirty perhaps we can add P'Tang, Yang, Kipperbang and Eskimo Day?

Declaration of Principles

This blog was inspired by a couple of things. One was a discussion on film criticism in the age of the internet in the magazine Cineaste. In particular the critic and blogger Robert Cashill, who wrote: ‘there are an estimated 113 million blogs out there and 112 million seem to be about film.’ The significance is simply the sheer amount of writing on the cinema on the web, some of it interesting and well thought out, much of it - perhaps most of it - worthless. Some of the serious journals – including Sight and Sound, Film Comment, and Cineaste – have looked at the future of film criticism and painted a bleak picture. The message is that the rise of the internet means the days of journalists and historians paid to express their curiosity and thirst for film are numbered. The fear is a loss of expertise and knowledge and the issue becomes one of trust. Where does one go to read intelligent analysis of the movies or be pointed in the direction of the ones we should be watching?

The name of this blog was inspired by a 1979 British television drama directed by Bob Brooks and written by Jack Rosenthal. The Knowledge is the story of a group of men all hoping to become licensed drivers of black cabs in London. To achieve this, they must gain ‘the knowledge’ – the ability to remember every street name and every potential route through the city. From the outset we are made aware that the task is so monumental that most of them will fail. But, despite this, the underlying theme is that the attempt to learn the knowledge, or indeed any knowledge, is worthwhile; indeed it is to grow as a human being.

I wouldn’t want to take this metaphor too far; the aim of the blog is not to navigate the history of cinema in the same way that a London cabbie would the city (that journey may be beyond all of us!); more it is to take the subject of film seriously, to reject flippancy and rumour and to celebrate intelligence. In the spirit of Charles Foster Kane’s declaration of principles, ‘The Knowledge’ will make some promises and try and keep them. Contained within the first is an acknowledgement that most people coming across this blog will be seeking out information or comment on a certain film or filmmaker rather than to read this particular writer, so let’s make those details as accurate as possible. I’ll go further; I want to make this blog a trusted voice, a place for opinion and debate, yes, but never based on supposition or scurrilous falsehoods. A second promise is to 'spread the wealth’, to let you know where the best film knowledge on the web and elsewhere is. A lot of blogs, most notably GreenCine, do this already and incredibly successfully. But some of the subject matter here will be pretty specialised and off the beaten track, so having as many different routes to the information won’t hurt at all.

I hope that doesn’t sound too high minded. The Knowledge (we’ll get rid of those quotation marks now if that’s okay) is about revelling in the entertainment of film and supposed to be fun – for the reader as much as the blogger. But it never hurts to set out your store as it were. Be seeing you.