by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Fingers at
the Window, a 1942 oddball “B” from
MGM that Turner Classic Movies recently showed in an all-day tribute to Basil
Rathbone and made it sound in their schedule like an MGM attempt to poach on
Universal horror territory: “A magician uses hypnosis
to create an army of murderers.” Actually Rathbone played a mad scientist and
was billed third — after the nominal leads, Lew Ayres and Laraine Day (Ayres
made this movie just before declaring himself a conscientious objector during
World War II; before that he’d been under contract to MGM to make the Dr.
Kildare movies, but Louis B. Mayer was so
incensed by his refusal to fight that he not only fired him but cut out all his
footage from a recently completed Kildare film and had it rewritten and reshot
to eliminate his character — and to add to the irony, Ayres agreed to serve in
the war as a combat medic, thereby becoming in real life what he’d been playing
in the Kildare movies.) The movie opens with a marvelously Gothic sequence that
makes it seem like MGM’s model for the film wasn’t the Universal horrors but
Val Lewton’s recently released Cat People
from RKO; after a brief bit of exposition establishing that five people have
been mysteriously murdered by ax-wielding killers who are invariably captured
at the scene, but are mentally too far gone even to identify themselves, much
less explain their motives, we see a shadowy sequence of yet another murderer
stalking yet another victim, while out-of-work actor Oliver Duffy (Lew Ayres)
comes along in the nick of time to keep Edwina Brown (Laraine Day) from
becoming victim number seven — though, natch, she misunderstands his intentions
and thinks he’s trying to pick her up.
The sequence is directed by Charles
Lederer (usually a screenwriter, but in the early 1940’s after Preston Sturges’
directorial debut, The Great McGinty,
was a box-office smash, a number of long-time studio writers got chances to
direct; some of them, like John Huston and Billy Wilder, did so well they made
a permanent career change from writing to direction, but others, like Lederer
and Ben Hecht, bombed as directors and went back to writing) in shadowy Gothic
style with such Lewtonian trademarks as spooky sound effects and ironically
used source music (a choir from a Salvation Army-style mission) instead of a
tacky background score, and even a cat (Edwina loses her pet black cat and
barely finds it in time to scoop it up and get it and herself into her
apartment before the killer can strike — a scene Suzanne Collins used seriously in the third Hunger Games novel, Mockingjay).
Alas, the movie goes downhill from there, hamstrung by a weak story and script
by Rose Caylor and Lawrence P. Bachmann (Caylor wrote the story solo and they
worked on the script together) — one wonders if Lederer, who might have been
able to fix the holes in the script if he’d been allowed to rewrite it himself,
was instead handed the script and told to shoot it come scritto. Rathbone is billed third but is barely in the film at
all; there’s a brief scene in the opening in which he’s giving sotto voce hypnotic instructions to his latest killer (he’s
recruiting them from a mental hospital where he works as a psychiatrist), then
another in the middle and he reappears about 10 minutes before the end for the
final climactic confrontation. The writers also err by making Laraine Day’s
character utterly stupid; had they made her spunkier and braver, as well as
smarter, they could have had a better and more suspenseful movie. As it is,
it’s one of those films that keeps the characters in total ignorance of what’s
going on while making us, the audience, all too aware — we may not know all the
details of Rathbone’s plot or his motives, but we know he’s the bad guy minutes
into the film.
There are some pretty basic plot holes in this one, including
the insistence of the police that the six ax murders are totally unrelated
crimes that just happen to be occurring
consecutively — one would think that somebody would notice that all the
arrested killers were being treated for schizophrenia at the same asylum, just
as one would think the cops would investigate the backgrounds of the victims looking for connections — which provide the motive for the
killings, though we don’t learn that until the end. It seems that Rathbone’s
character is a doctor named Caesar Ferrari who lived for years in Paris, where
he dated and ultimately proposed to Edwina Brown (we know that because even
though in the main part of the movie she’s slowly falling for Oliver Duffy,
she’s got a picture of Rathbone in a small suitcase in her room), only to break
off with her when an announcement of an upcoming wedding appears in a
newspaper. Anxious to flee Paris and also to get his hands on a multi-million
dollar inheritance, he murders one Dr. Santelle and assumes his identity, then
travels to the U.S. and sets up shop in Chicago — and brainwashes inmates of
the asylum where he works (all of whom seem to have last names beginning with
“B” — we find that out when Lew Ayres’
character infiltrates the asylum and notices all their file cards in the
appropriate drawer for that letter) to kill anybody in Chicago who knew him
when he was in Paris and could therefore expose his money-making imposture as
Dr. Santelle. There are quite a few good scenes in Fingers at the Window — including a really funny one in which Oliver fools Dr.
Kurt Immelmann (Miles Mander) into thinking he’s crazy so he can rifle through
the doctor’s files with impunity, and another gag scene in which he and Edwina
infiltrate a medical meeting to try to find Santelle, then have to leave in a
hurry when Immelmann is about to recognize him — but the fact that this film
has as many laughs as chills is in itself an indication of what’s wrong with
it: yet another example of a movie imbalanced against itself and not sure
whether it wants to be a serious drama or a spoof.
Rathbone is properly
chilling in his scenes — especially the one in which he administers Oliver an
unnecessary injection of insulin to kill him in the hospital (where he’s resting
after Rathbone caught up with him on the El and pushed him into the path of an
incoming train — fortunately Oliver was able to save himself by grabbing onto
one of the cross-rails, but he was injured when he lost his grip and fell to
the street) — and there are other clever scenes, including one in which
Rathbone keeps up his imposture by introducing someone else as Dr. Santelle and
Edwina tells Oliver (rightly) that she hasn’t seen that man before, as well as
a gag scene in which a montage of newspaper headlines details the impact of the
murders on Chicago’s economy and the last is a headline in Variety explaining in Variety‑speak that the murders have had a devastating effect on
Chicago’s theatre attendance (this is the way the writers introduce Ayres’
character — dressed throughout in top hat and tails because that was his
costume in the play he and his troupe were performing until the company closed
because nobody was going out anymore — though it also calls up yet another plot
hole: at one point Ayres is shown giving his last money, a nickel, to a newsboy
to buy a paper containing an account of the latest murder, but later on he has
the money to hire Edwina a taxi to take her home when “unforeseen
circumstances,” we’re never told precisely what, force him to break a date with
her; that’s the sequence in which she’s being stalked and nearly doesn’t get
inside her building in time because her cat runs off and she won’t go in
without the animal) — and Lederer directs with a real flair for Gothic horror and
suspense but at the mercy of a script that trips him up at several plot points
and turns Fingers at the Window into a
creaky melodrama instead of the horror-suspense thriller we were expecting and
for which we were hoping.
