THE CINEMATOGRAPH

Chase a Crooked Shadow
1958, directed by Michael Anderson

Underneath its manipulations there’s a fundamental benevolence in Chase a Crooked Shadow, which is important because so much of its energy is invested in a game… or rather in two games, because the film plays with its audience the same way Inspector Williams plays with Kimberley Prescott, staging a grand deception and toying with our nerves.

The film arrays a full arsenal of tricks against the viewer to prevent anyone guessing the secret. Chief among the tricks is that the audience isn’t even aware of a crime, other than a possible theft, so that there’s no question of “who-done-it” hanging over the plot. Ward had died in a crash, which is no surprise for a race car driver, and no one seems to doubt that it was an accident. Secondly, the diamonds and Kim’s purported madness are big red herrings that a lesser film would have been happy to utilize as the basis for a surprise ending. Thirdly, the film works hard against any suspicion that the intruders might be police – they’re foreigners; they behave like criminals (especially in Kim’s absence); and the local police are kept out of the loop. Fourthly, Kim looks so consistently innocent, while her opponents are so consistently sinister. The film plays on a vulnerability in the audience’s logic: if we guess correctly that the intruders are lying, we’re likely to conclude, incorrectly, that Kim is telling the truth.

Kim is able to maintain her innocent appearance because in a real sense she is innocent. She killed her brother out of desperate love for her father, and although she stole the diamonds, we can believe she is not motivated by wealth. Moreover, all of her reactions are genuine. When Uncle Chan seems to betray her, when she’s threatened with drowning, or when Vargas says the fingerprints match, her vulnerability is unmistakable. When the unwanted guests seem to leave after getting her signature for the bank in Tangiers, her relief is palpable. Whenever her nemesis presents a new proof that he’s her brother – the photos in the bedroom, the anchor tattoo, the cigarette case, etc. – any sympathetic viewer must share her incredulous rage. Conversely, the inspector and his team look sinister because in a real sense they are. Their methods amount to psychological torture.

As agonous as Kim’s day and a half with her brother’s impostor must be, she’s not merely a helpless victim. At times she gets into the spirit of the game, taking evident delight in testing the inspector’s facade. In two parallel scenes she challenges him to live up to her brother’s memory: the “swimming drink” scene at the beach house, and the speed test on the coastal highway. One is a mental test, the other physical. From a procedural point of view, the inspector needn’t pass either test – he and she are alone together; they both know he’s not her brother; and each knows that the other knows it. Nevertheless it’s not only for the audience’s sake that he has to maintain the charade. By meeting her challenges he further intimidates her. He won’t make her believe him, but she’s becoming all too aware that the world will believe him. The inspector has apparently calculated her considerable strength, and the only way to get a confession is to weaken her in stages. The flip side of their charade is that they both know what she’s done, only she doesn’t know that he knows it, and he can’t prove it in a court of law.

The confession scene is powerful because it’s so carefully prepared for, so well acted, and delivered so economically, telling us all we need to know in a few words: “I did something to the brakes on his car.” The following moments are also remarkable in a couple of ways. With very few outward signs to show it, everyone’s attitude reverses as a new understanding sweeps through the room. Inspector Williams, Mrs. Whitman, Carlos, Uncle Chan, and Comisario Vargas look on Kimberley Prescott with evident sympathy, and they too become sympathetic, some of them for the first time. Again, many of the characters are in front of arches, most conspicuously Kim herself, whose ordeal has been like the trials of a saint.

The prevailing attitude however is not only sympathy. There’s also a hushed awe in the air, which any appreciative audience must share as well. Everyone has witnessed a moment of raw humanity. In Kim’s gasping confession, it becomes clear that she had wished to keep the secret even from herself. She must reach within and pull it out, because she can hardly face the fact that she’s killed her brother. We can infer that she never wished to do it, but only killed him under duress, hoping to save her beloved father. The awe must also extend to the actors themselves, who have just witnessed the finale of a breathtaking performance as Anne Baxter sustained her character through every terror with superhuman dignity.

Chase a Crooked Shadow may be a mystery thriller, but its genre classification puts it at a disadvantage that probably accounts for its obscurity today. It hides its secret so well that critics and viewers who enjoy feeling superior to movies, or others who tend to resist any sort of machinations, will rebel against it. The film however is not an exercise in belittling the viewer. Anyone who willingly submits to it up until the end may appreciate that the real power of the ending is not the surprise as much as the discovery of a genuine humanity in all the characters. The ambiguity between guilt and innocence, the idea that there may be a kernel of innocence in guilt and a buried guilt under the mask of innocence, extends into real life as well.

An impossible premise sustains the plot of Chase a Crooked Shadow, the idea that Kim and the man in her house are siblings. Despite the imbalance of power, this notion creates an equivalence between them that heightens the film’s ambiguity. Each of them holds a secret, and each brings a particular strength to the contest – her extraordinary composure and his resourcefulness. There are also visual hints of equivalence; for instance, he dangles the car keys before her the same way she had dangled the big diamond in front of him. This equivalence, and the fact that they’re both engaged in a sort of game, creates a current of intimacy between them that surfaces at the seaside café, at the piano, and at the terrace bar when she speculates out loud about their relationship. “If the circumstances were different, if you weren’t… who you are… then what would we talk about? What would you think of me then, I wonder.” The circumstances of the plot do not allow the film to develop any romance between them, but those hints of intimacy are enough to forge a bond that increases the emotional force of the ending.

If we look at Chase a Crooked Shadow simply as a late British noir, it becomes a mere outlier, a curiosity. Despite its adherence to the conventions of a crime film, it would be more fruitful to regard it as a herald of the radical experiments with ambiguity that would soon follow in the creative flowering of the 1960s, in films like Last Year at Marienbad, L’eclisse, and Persona. It’s a more modern film than its noir predecessors, breaking the “fourth wall” in its implicit homage to Baxter’s performance at the end and in the way it confronts the viewer, questioning our assumptions and our motives as spectators.

CONNECTIONS:

Suspicion – Plot with sustained uncertainty; sinister glass of milk; suspenseful drive on a rugged coast

Spellbound – Actress put through the paces of her character to reveal an extraordinary dignity

Le beau Serge – Seemingly conventional preface to the radical ambiguity of films in the 1960s

Breaking the Waves – Persecution of a woman whose sanity is in doubt; definition of innocence or goodness

Get Out – Film does to its audience, in a benevolent way, what its antagonists do to their victim(s); setting in an isolated mansion