John Brahm’s The Brasher Doubloon, an adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s 1942 novel, The High Window, is a mixed bag of a film. It’s held back by the central performance of George Montgomery whose breezy take on detective Philip Marlowe doesn’t stand up well against earlier turns by Humphrey Bogart and Dick Powell. The film fares better in its rich atmosphere of gothic melodrama and expressionistic villainy. The latter is exemplified by the memorable turn of Alfred Linder as one-eyed henchman Eddie Prue, who seems to have stepped out of a German era Fritz Lang film (indeed, his boss’s nightclub bears an uncanny resemblance to the criminal’s bar in Lang’s 1931 masterpiece M). The gothic melodrama is provided by The Murdoch household, the shady dysfunctional family who have called in Marlowe to find a stolen heirloom, a rare and valuable coin named the ‘The Brasher Doubloon’.
The film begins with Marlowe driving up to the family home in Pasadena. He enters a doom-laden atmosphere, haunted by shifting shadows, heavy curtains, and endless howling wind. He has been summoned by a Mrs Murdoch (Florence Bates), the matriarch of this oneiric domain. Inside he encounters an attractive, nervous secretary Merle Davis (Nancy Guild), who feels it necessary to warn him of her employer’s troublesome manner and her shifty son (Conrad Janis), who tries to block his meeting. Finally, Marlowe is introduced to the lady herself, sitting in a high-backed wicker chair in her ornate conservatory. She bluntly tells him where to sit and not to smoke, then makes a grab for her large glass of port and informs him it’s for medicinal purposes and he’s not getting any. Florence Bates is more than in her element here, she’d been playing Grand Old Dame roles since her theatre debut as Miss Bates in Jane Austen’s Emma in the mid-thirties (the character she subsequently took her stage name from). She’d played variations on the role over the next 20 years in films like Rebecca (1940) and The Mask of Dimitrios (1944). But Mrs Murdoch is not your average Grand Old Dame. There’s the usual prim stuffy manner that one associates with a Bates performance but there’s variations at play which hint at something darker and more disturbed. Firstly, there’s a slight slurring of words, suggesting Mrs Murdoch may have consumed a rather large amount of her ‘medical port’. It’s not played for comic effect, rather it shows a woman composing herself with great will against any sign of drunkenness. Then there’s the sharp cruel way she snaps at the secretary, Merle, leaving an impression on Marlowe that something suspicious is at play in their dynamic. Finally, there’s the moment, unnoticed by Marlowe but seen by the audience, where she pulls a bizarre facial tick just after shouting out Merle’s name, it’s surreal in its discrepancy and so brief as to make you wonder whether it really happened. Mrs Murdoch tells him she knows who took the doubloon but won’t give the name and generally annoys Marlowe with her haughty manner of self-importance to the degree that he initially refuses the case (he eventually takes it due to his not entirely professional interest in Merle).
Two murders later and Marlow is back at the Murdoch household, they all claim the Doubloon has been returned but Marlowe has it in his pocket. He confronts Mrs Murdoch about Merle; about why she seems constantly terrified and isn’t allowed callers. Mrs Murdoch claims her secretary is “easily disturbed”. Marlow picks up on the word and notes that it’s a term used to describe insane patients. Mrs Murdoch leans forward and replies: “Is it?” Bates delivers the line in a wonderfully ambiguous fashion, there’s a deliberate mock coyness but it’s hard to read, she would initially seem to be implying that Merle is indeed troubled, but the delivery also has a strange vulnerability, as if Mrs Murdoch has something more personal invested in the question. Again, for a moment we get a glimpse of something “easily disturbed” that may be lurking just under the surface of this outwardly indomitable personality.
What the audience is beginning to suspect is finally confirmed in the last scene. Marlow has worked out that Mrs Murdoch was being blackmailed over a piece of film which showed her husband being pushed from a window several years earlier; she had somehow manipulated Merle to believe that it was she who had killed Mrs Murdoch’s husband but Marlow has enlarged the film to reveal it was Mrs Murdoch herself who was the killer. Finally, the mask slips and in a genuinely disturbing paranoic rant Mrs Murdoch’s murderous psychopathy is revealed. She lunges at Merle, accusing her of trying to seduce her husband and then revels in the fact that she’s broken her and made her a nervous wreck: “What man would fall in love with a lunatic!” she screams. This last word is delivered with such physicality that it’s a genuine shock. One imagines Bates must have relished the role, which gave her a rare chance to explore some of the darker regions of the human psyche. The way she slowly peels back the veneer of her character’s identity to reveal the psychopath beneath is masterful and is certainly the takeaway performance from this lesser-known but enjoyable Chandler adaptation.
Sandy Milroy.
View Movie at: https://archive.org/details/the-brasher-doubloon-1947
