Unholy Four, The (1954)

September 17, 2008

by Nathan Shumate

aka A Stranger Came Home

Directed by Terence Fisher
Produced and written by Michael Carreras, based on the novel Stranger at Home by George Sanders
Starring
- Paulette Goddard
- William Sylvester
- Patrick Holt
- Paul Carpenter
- Alvys Maben

It appears to have been very easy to fall into a formula with these Robert Lippert/Hammer Films co-productions. The presence in England of the American protagonist was usually explained as a post-War business thing, his British wartime buddy was usually the person who got him into trouble or betrayed him, and the plot usually unfolded in a straightforward, step-by-step manner as the protagonist first found himself in trouble and methodically went about uncovering why.

This entry in the co-production deal shakes things up a bit. The recognizable American star working for cheap isn’t a man, for one thing; it’s Paulette Goddard, an actress who had come to prominence in silent films such as Modern Times (1936) and got even better work (unlike many of her pre-talkie cohorts) in the ’40s, after the transition to sound. By the time of this film, Goddard was 44, old enough that Hollywood was starting to transition her out of leading roles and into parts for women “of a certain age.” She’s also not the protagonist of this film, which I suppose one could use as a rank against sexism and the marginalization of women even when their names come above the credits — isn’t she the one recognizable name in this low-budget flick? — but if her supporting role here rankled, she doesn’t let it show.

I HATE it when actors come to auditions with out-of-date headshots!

Also diverging from the general trend in these pictures is the absence of any explanation of Americans mixed in with the Brits. No war stories, no tortured “Say, you’re a Yank, aren’t you?” dialog. My guess is that the novel the script is based on, Stranger at Home by George Sanders, assumes British citizenship without fanfare for all characters, and in the transition to the silver screen American actors were simply dropped into some of the roles without any need for explanation.

And finally, our story begins not with character introductions followed by an inciting incident, but with the inciting incident arguably far behind us, and character introductions to be parted out piecemeal as needed. Our first image is of a man (William Sylvester) in workman’s clothes being dropped off by taxi at the gates of a large estate at night. He’s greeted by the dog in residence, who remembers and adores him, and lets himself into the fine house at the end of the drive. There he waits for the woman on the phone (Alvys Maben) to notice him:

-Hello, Joan. Where’s Angie?

-Philip! Wh– Where’ve you been? What’s happened to you?

-Where’s Angie?

-She’s not here. She’s down at the river cottage.

-I see. Still the same crowd, the same parties? Are my things still upstairs?

-Philip, why didn’t you let us know?

-And spoil the surprise? Get yourself a drink, Joan. You look awful.

So how much more intriguing this is than the bald, broad character sketch that usually starts these movies off?

“Jeez, why couldn’t the diva just walk to her trailer like everyone else?”

Alas, I cannot take you through the whole thing step by step, so to summary we shall go: Philip Vickers, aka “Vick” to his peers, is back after a four-year absence. He had been on a fishing expedition in Portugal when he was waylaid and left for dead; amnesia for three years kept him from limping his way home to England alone. Now he’s back, with a clear memory of who he is and of the voice that called him by name before striking him down — meaning that the assault was no random robbery. His fishing trip had been with three friends and business associates: Job (Patrick Holt, and it’s pronounced like “employment,” not like “longsuffering Old Testament character,”), Bill (Paul Carpenter, familiar from Paid to Kill (1954) and The Black Glove (1954)), and Harry, all of whom were at least a little bit in love with Vick’s wife Angie (Goddard). So now he’s back to find out which of the three tried to kill him, and whether his wife was in collusion with the culprit.

That would be enough of a story springboard right there, but wait — there’s more! There’s a party going on in the garden cottage when he arrives, and he appears like an unwelcome ghost to Job and Bill, but doesn’t catch up with Angie until morning. And he never catches up with Harry; by morning, Harry is discovered dead of a blow to the head. The police, in the form of Inspector Treherne (Russell Napier), of course suspects the suddenly-returned man of the house of protecting the honor of his presumptive widow from too eager a suitor; Vick himself doesn’t know if Harry’s murder was in response to his reappearance or a coincident crime.

“And believe me, cooking wasn’t the only thing I picked up on a merchant freighter.” (I have no idea what I mean by that.)

But he’s bound to find out.

Here’s another uncommon angle to this story — uncommon in this production series, and in cinema generally: Vick ain’t a real likable guy. Granted, what we see of him is with a chip on his shoulder after four years of exile, colored by an omnipresent paranoia focused on his wife and “best friends.” But dialog makes it clear that he was never terribly friendly, and was held in masked contempt by his closest associates, and maybe even his wife. That actually makes the whodunit aspects of the plot that much more believable; if the victim of attempted murder is a pricklier specimen of humanity than your average innocently-wronged hero, then each of the suspects is more plausibly guilty without showing the kind of blatant character traits which normally mark them as “the kind of person” who commits murder.

You can’t outrun the Long Nose of the Law.

Of course, it just would be a review from yours truly if I didn’t natter on about “third act problems” and suchlike, would it? The hardest part of any good whodunit is misdirecting the audience so that they will rule out the obvious suspect early on, and then keeping the tension up by presenting evidence for or against the whole cast. In this case, though, we’ve only got four suspects for Vick’s attempted murder. The assumption is made early on that, yes, Harry’s murder is related to the attempt on Vick, if not necessarily committed by the same party, so that effectively takes Harry out of the running for Vick’s near-murder and reduces our suspect count to three (the police have four, but we know better than to suspect Vick), plus Joan the social secretary, plus Jennie (Kay Callard) the partygoer who was also Harry’s fiancee (and then she leaves in an early scene and is never heard from again). So four suspects, until they also start getting ruled out pretty conclusively… The end result is that the last twenty minutes of the movie seems less like dramatic tension and more like stalling so we don’t work our way to the inexorable conclusion too soon for this feature to qualify for distribution requirements.

None of the stars shine overmuch, but none fail the roles given them. William Sylvester as Vick is reserved and methodical as only someone obsessed with payback can be, Patrick Holt as Job is nervous and edgy thanks to business malfeasance that he’d rather Vick not discover, and Paul Carpenter as Bob inhabits well the persona we’ve come to expect after Paid to Kill and The Black Glove, the guy who’s sitting on the fence between decent and weaselly. In fact, if anyone isn’t altogether convincing, it’s Paulette Goddard — the star star — who can never quite pull off the ambiguous conflict of having her beloved come back out of the blue with a paranoid streak that encompasses even her; instead, she seems to love or hate him in successive scenes, but never both at the same time.

“Stop! Ha ha ha! No fair, that TICKLES!”

That said, this still ranks clearly in the upper half of the Hammer Noirs produced in that same period; the screenplay is spare, rarely repeating information or spelling plot point out for those audience members that weren’t paying attention. And the police investigation actually makes a difference, instead of simply being the obligatory but irrelevant display of the forces of law and order. If all of The Unholy Four’s sibling co-productions had been this good or better, Hammer Films might have had more intellectual capital invested in crime dramas and thus not been so eager to leap onto that horror thing that afterward became their bread and butter.