D. Ted Green
B&W
A year after the first Dropper Harris movie, Cary Grant was
back. This is interesting in itself, as sequels were far from the norm back
then and certainly not the done thing for major stars. They were the preserve
of men with the surnames Weissmuller and Crabbe, Olympic swimmers who’d turned
to – what could loosely be described as – acting, rather than serious cinema
players. Yet the ‘Dropper Harris’ movies, although clearly made with a higher
budget and better actors, are trading in the same language as your Tarzans and
Flash Gordons. They are popcorn, adventure films, there to provide mindless
entertainment, but of a higher quality and with bigger thrills. Which means
that decades before George Lucas and Steven Spielberg took those old adventure
films and turned them into ‘Indiana Jones’, Cary Grant was – as always –
already leading the way.
Here we are back in a London of the mind, a London that
bears as much resemblance to the 1930s or the 1890s as it does to now. There
are horse drawn carts and Dropper Harris’s housekeeper seems to be wed to an
old fashioned mangle. But there are also speeding black Ford automobiles and
gangsters, some of whom would not be out of place in Chicago. Harris catches what
he refers to “the London tube”, but it’s one of those sleek trains you imagine carrying
you from Grand Central to Union Station. It even has a bar for god’s sake! Most
jarring of all though is Harris’s portable communication device, which he keeps
in his pocket and looks and treats just like a mobile phone (albeit it’s
something like a Nokia from the turn of the century, rather than an iPhone.
This film isn’t that forward looking!) This is a mix of the present, the past
and a million possible futures. This is Dropper Harris’s world and we’re
supposed to goggle at it.
Along with his trusty sidekick Binky (Tommy Harrison),
Harris finds himself again investigating a music based case. This time they are
backstage at the opera where two warring parties of gangsters are prone to
machine-gunning each other at the crescendos of arias. One is your standard
group of hard-faced, monosyllabic muscle, the others are Charles Laughton’s
antiquarian gangsters. Hoodlums, known as The Charing Cross Road Gang who – and
I’m not making this up – love nothing better than first editions and are
running a protection racket involving all the libraries in London. Elsewhere we
have the delicious Margaret Lockwood as a femme fatale soprano, and Claude
Rains as an ineffective policeman. The plot, once it gets there, never really
leaves backstage of The Royal Opera House – and so we have something like
‘Night at the Opera’ meets ‘Scarface’ meets ‘The 39 Steps’ but even more
complex than such a bizarre mash-up would suggest. Mystery piles on top of mystery
until it all falls over into a conclusion which is brilliant, but doesn’t make
the slightest bit of sense. That doesn’t matter though, as by the end, all we
want to know is what is Leslie Howard’s conductor really up to?
It’s incredibly fun and fast paced (seriously, the way Grant
rat-tat-tats the dialogue here makes it seem like he was doing ‘His Girl
Friday’ while on mogadon). If you tried to think about how all the strands
actually tie together your brain would explode, but this is one of the most
invigorating films the 1930s ever produced.
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