Cinema of the Caribbean: I See A Dark Stranger

I See A Dark Stranger may be considered a failure as a movie, but it's certainly one of the most interesting failures of all time. It begins as the disturbing story of a pretty young colleen whose nationalism leads her to betray Irish neutrality in World War II in order to serve the Nazis. Halfway through, it inexplicably drops its serious theme and veers into the direction of slapstick comedy. The transition is so abrupt that it's clearly meant to convey something to the audience. When you factor in the innumerable jabs at Irish nationhood and Irish independence perpetrated by the British filmmakers, you're left with the feeling that the film is brazenly anti-Irish.

Released in 1946, Dark Stranger begins with its central character, Bridie Quilty, reaching her 21st birthday and setting off from Ballygarry to visit a man who fought alongside her father in the Easter Rising of 1916. She finds him a museum curator in Dublin, safely tending to well-scrubbed portraits of dead Irish heroes - the obvious metaphor here being that the revolutionaries have all been cashiered. When Bridie tries to coax the old man into giving her entree into the Irish Republican Army, he kindly shows her the door. She settles for defacing a statue instead.

Britain's hubs are lousy with German spies, and Bridie is soon being spun like a top by a Nazi spy who seizes on her foaming, quasi-racial hatred of the English (she registers disgust at one man's Cromwell jaw and refuses to talk to him). She is soon assisting the spy in a plan to spring Nazi captives from British custody; her bit is to distract an English officer with feminine charms while the plan goes down. Bridie is such an incompetent stoogette, however, that everything goes to hell and both the Nazi spy and his intended evacuee are shot by English officers while Bridie looks on with an 'Oops!' attitude.

The film falls headfirst into slapstick when we see Bridie attempting to dispose of the body of the dead Nazi by wheeling his corpse through the streets in a wheelchair until she can find a suitable place to dump him. She's unable to get very far, however, because people stop to chat her up while the dead man sloshes about in the chair, his face covered by a hat. For a while it looks as if the film is going to turn into Weekend at Bridie's, but then things level out again. Even though it dynamites the treason theme established in the movie's first reel, I imagine that Hitchcock would have jumped at the chance to do something like this. He would have found a way to do it without losing the rest of the movie.

After disposing of the dead Nazi, Bridie stumbles into possession of - wait for it - secret information that could scotch the entire Allied invasion of Normandy. Sensing that the Nazis will probably make trouble for Ireland as well as Britain, she renounces her pro-Nazi position and decides to intercept the documents for Team Britain! She travels to the Isle of Man and then to the border areas of Ulster, where we get a headspinning brand of Celtic slapstick that involves people not knowing which side of the border they are on.

How much you enjoy this film will depend largely on whether you agree with me that Deborah Kerr and Trevor Howard are among the finest leads the screen has ever produced. Howard in particular appears again and again in my list of favorite films, from Brief Encounter to The Third Man to Von Ryan's Express. In Dark Stranger, he exhibits that quality of having just run onto the set mere seconds before the cameras began rolling, but still ready to work. Playing loose is necessary for this film - otherwise an actor would get whiplash from the frequent tonal changes.

Deborah Kerr is here an uncoiled viper, the opposite of the solemn, thoughtful characters she would play in The Sundowners and Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison. She looks and acts a lot like a young Joan Crawford - ready to claw your eyes out if you look at her cross-eyed, but still not a shrew. Always one of the most understated movie stars, Kerr brought a certain undercranked sensuality to all of her roles - she was never reaching for a performance or putting on a show of her sexuality. Anyone in the market for another of her quirky roles should check out The Innocents, co-scripted by Truman Capote and later re-made as The Others with Nicole Kidman.

I'm not nearly plugged in enough to this movie's esoteric vibes to understand what kind of signals the filmmakers were trying to send. Was this movie supposed to allay suspicions of Irish treachery in the war effort? Bridie is such a hapless twit that she's clearly supposed to represent Irish ineffectuality. Unless someone ropes Deborah Kerr into doing a commentary on a future DVD version of the film, I will probably never know the answer.

Interesting footnote: The movie's prolific screenwriting team of Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat also did Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes and Jamaica Inn, as well as dozens of other films throughout the 30s and 40s and beyond. But I don't see many successful comedies in their resume. Their strength obviously lay more in creating off-center or potentially controversial premises, rather than crafting laugh lines. Dark Stranger's first half is compelling and even a little shocking, but when the laughs start coming, they mostly come on the level of a bad guy falling into a bathtub, on top of another bad guy. I'm betting that Billy Wilder never returned their phone calls.