The Mask of Dimitrios

For a while after 1929, movies with sound were called "talkies."  Jean Negulsco's 1944 Mask of Dimitrios is exceedingly verbose -- it's a "talkie" with a vengeance and, therefore, a bit tedious.  Nonetheless, the film is worth seeing for Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre who are featured in the picture.  (Lorre and Greenstreet made nine films together, starting with Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon.  The Mask of Dimitrios is a lesser effort, not as effective as Negulsco's 1946 offering, Three Strangers, also starring the two actors.)  Adapted from a novel by Eric Ambler, Dimitrios has a complex plot, although one that is somewhat obvious in a certain respects -- about the third time we hear that Dimitrios' body was "bloated", it becomes obvious that the corpse on the slab wasn't Dimitrios at all and that he is poised to make a fourth act appearance in the show.  (This movie was Zachary Scott's first outing -- he plays Dimitrios.)   Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewiscz characterizes the film as a noir -- in fact, it is nothing of the kind:  rather, it is a B-movie spy thriller.  It sometimes looks like film noir but the sense of fatality lurking in every day life is missing -- the great noirs take place in gritty American cities and the suburbs:  Dimitrios is set in Istanbul and, then, leads it characters on a chase through Athens, Sofia, Belgrade, and Geneva. 

Dimitrios is a master criminal who has graduated from petty villainy into spying and political assassination.  Mr. Leyden, a Dutch mystery writer played by Peter Lorre, hears about Dimitrios supposed demise (a body washed-up on the shores of the Bosphorus) and learns about his exploits through a Turkish detective, Colonel Haki.  Intrigued, Lorre's character travels to cities in the Balkans where Dimitrios committed crimes -- he is planning a book about him.  Lorre is shadowed by Sydney Greenstreet's character, Mr. Peters.  Peters, as we will learn, was Dimitrios partner in crime in 1931, but betrayed by him and imprisoned.  He now plans to locate the criminal and avenge himself for Dimitrios' treachery.  The film is always pausing for people to say "I will tell you everything" -- this leads us from the film's verbose 1938 setting to equally verbose flashbacks involving Dimitrios' villainy.  The best of these episodes involves a hapless government clerk in Yugoslavia, cursed, as Shakespeare said somewhere, with a fair -- in this case ravishing -- wife.  The clerk is a humble fellow, underpaid, and Dimitrios, who has been charged with stealing a map showing Italian fortifications, compromises the man, seduces his wife, and forces him to abscond with the map.  (The clerk later kills himself).  Although this part of the film is exotic and involves long casino scenes, the general plot is reminiscent of some of Edward G. Robinson's work in the forties with Fritz Lang, particularly Scarlet Street, and this aspect of the film is, in fact, a precursor to film noir in that an ordinary, and unprepossessing man, is rendered complicit in a deadly criminal scheme that destroys him.

Negulsco's direction is atmospheric, full of menacing shadows, and dark rooms.  On occasion, he uses an elaborate mise-en-scene, staging scenes in a complex way that is intriguing but, ultimately, I think a bit pointless.  David Bordwell, who wrote a book on film "blocking" and mise-en-scene, (2005's Figures Traced in Light) would appreciate one of the first sequences in which Lorre and Greenstreet share the screen together.  (Negulsco's approach to his two curious-looking stars is to show them separately and emphasize how different they are from one another, and what different milieu they occupy, and, then, find a clever way to imprison them together in the same frame. "We must form an alliance!" Greenstreet proclaims to the ever-timorous and reluctant Lorre.)  In this film, Negulsco, who has a penchant for low angles showing the set's ceilings, shoots up toward a government official searching for a file that Lorre has requested.  Lorre is located in the left lower part of the frame.  As the official moves his ladder a little to the left, the shot reveals Greenstreet entering the office and taking his seat in the deep background of the shot.  It's very funny and effective.  Later, there is a scene in which Dimitrios comes into a room from outside -- the shot is designed like something by Max Ophuls:  the camera tracks along a series of windows with Dimitrios outside them, moving to the left; we expect Dimitrios to burst through a window, but instead he moves parallel to the tracking camera, outside the room, turns a corner, appears in yet another window on the wall, and, then, enters through a door -- I suppose the shot is supposed to emblematize the fact that Dimitrios will always be able to enter a room and that nothing can keep him out.  But it's very showy, must have been expensive and hard to choreograph and seems intrusively ornate.  Dimitrios' assassination of a government official also involves pouring rain, a long tracking shot to the left, and, then, even an overt miscue:  a flash on a camera simulates a gunshot, the muzzle flash from Dimitrios' gun occurs a second later. 

At the climax of the film, little Peter Lorre cries out that Greenstreet is his friend and he will not see him abused by Dimitrios, who has just plugged Mr. Peters with a couple of shots.  Lorre knocks aside Dimitrios pistol and hand and grapples with the big, thuggish criminal -- it's extremely effective because so unanticipated and because the fight is so unequal.  Earlier in the film, we have seen a cabaret owner played by a woman who looks exactly like a exuberant female impersonator -- she too has a strange tale to tell about Dimitrios, but the woman with her shaved and penciled-in eyebrows, her glittering tight-fitting kimono, and her broad shoulders is like a vision from a nightmare.