1947’s The Flame is the kind of noir where the entire story is told in flashback. That is a conventional device for the genre, and it isn’t the first picture where everything we see from the past is being read for a very long letter. In these kinds of films, I always wonder who had the time to write what appears to be a novella. Also, why do we see events that were apparently described in the letter but for which the author wasn’t present?
It is New Year’s Eve and John Carroll is reading this massive missive from Vera Ralston. In addition to the length of the letter, the purple prose cannot make for easy reading. Just consider how it begins: “I should have known sooner that the hate that you bore your half-brother must one day bring you to this point. Crime and passion are a bad mixture at best. When the passion is hate, nothing but evil and violence can result.” The Cliff’s Notes version would be: “Your hatred of your half-brother will bring about nothing good”. Got it.
And Carroll needs to finish that letter in a hurry, as he has taken a bullet through the chest. We weren’t even sure he had been shot, given he had no reaction when that happened, it being the final act of the man Carroll had killed. After getting shot, Carroll even calmly gets in his car and drives home, getting stopped by an officer along the way. I like how he thinks he is being apprehended already for the murder, only this was for speeding.
The past, as relayed in the letter, has Ralston tell Carroll and the audience telling about her time as a nurse to Robert Paige. This that half-brother hated by Carroll. He is suffering from a fatal, unspecified illness which reminded me of the Imminent Death Syndrome sketch from Mr. Show. Paige whiles away the hours playing dirges on an organ during what look like insufferable days in a gothic mansion. This doesn’t seem to bother Paige’s aunt, played by Blanche Yurka, but Ralston describes living there as “It is 8:30 outside, but in this house it is midnight all the time.” Thus goth was invented.
Paige starts singing a different tune, and playing different tunes, when he realizes Ralston would be interested in him, if only he wasn’t so morose. A romance between the two leads to marriage, though Yurka believes Ralston is only doing so to inherit the millions she’ll get when Paige meet his pending demise. When Ralston is looking for “something borrowed” on her wedding day, Yurka provides a brooch of hers that is a snake strangling a deer. I marveled that such a piece of jewelry would ever be made and why anybody would buy it. Suddenly, the self-described “pussy rings” Grimes was selling at one point don’t seem as strange.
Yurka is right to be suspicious, as this is a long con planned by Ralston and Carroll. Turns out they are still in a relationship that began back when she was his nurse when he was recuperating in France from an injury incurred in the war.
But Ralston has a surprise coming as well, as Carroll has been two-timing her with neighbor Constance Dowling. A further complication is introduced when a menacing Broderick Crawford enters the picture. He is obsessed with Dowling, only he no longer has the money to keep her in the manner she expects. The scheming Crawford notices Ralston leaving Carroll’s apartment, does the math, and realizes a blackmail opportunity to get him the funds to restore him in Dowling’s good graces.
In the meantime, Ralston finds herself feeling genuine love towards the man she had married only for the windfall she’ll receive—and soon, if the doctor is right. It helps that Paige lightens up considerably. She advised him to step away from a high cliff at one point and he says, “If the fall down there didn’t kill me, the climb back up would.”
Keep in mind all of this is in flashback, and we keep returning to Ralston’s letter, which we hear in voiceover while Carroll is reading it. It seems she has assumed Paige’s earlier bleak demeanor, as she writes such awkwardly phrased passages as “Only dazedly do I recall the next few days.” Ralston, a Czech actress formerly surnamed Hruba, has a very thick accent which compounds the strangeness of lines such as these. The wife of the head of Republic Pictures, she was notorious for subpar performances in the pictures made by her husband’s company. In my review of 1944’s The Lady and the Monster, I had this to say about her: “When delivering dialogue, she seems to randomly cycle through expressions in hopes she might accidentally hit the right emotional beat for the syllable she happens to be on at any given time.” She is far better in this picture and even better than she would be in her last film, The Man Who Died Twice, which made eleven years after this one. I haven’t seen her entire filmography, but I suspect this is her career best.
The rest of the cast all turn in very good performances, especially the always-reliable Crawford. Another welcome sight is Hattie MacDaniel. Sure, the Gone with the Wind veteran is once again playing a domestic, but I dare anybody to say that, among the characters in this movie, there is anybody they would prefer spending time with over her.
It helps that, by the end of the runtime, many of the characters end up being different than how they are initially presented. Carroll is not the hero, the morbid Paige becomes a glowingly happy man, and Ralston proves to not be a cold-hearted gold-digger. There are good roles in a movie from a poverty row studio that was wise to focus primarily on the script.
And that script provides some interesting bits of noir business for the actors, such as Dowling comes up to Carroll’s apartment with the playfully stated intention of borrowing a cup of bourbon. It also provides many clever lines, something I always think of as the cheapest special effect. Consider this exchange between Carroll and Crawford: “Everywhere I go, I see your face.” “Where I take my face is my business.” Even the thinly-sketched physician played by Henry Travers gets lines like these, this one from when he happens upon Ralston in the family mansion’s chapel: “An interesting place to write prescriptions. I remember my Latin better in church.”
Surprisingly, this movie also looks good for being on a Republic budget. Skylights in a set of a hallway add an interesting element to the visual. Only the light from a fire illuminates Carroll as the dying man sinks into a chair in his apartment. The single best shot begins at a spotlight and follows the beam down to Dowling singing on a nightclub stage.
There are even some attempts at visual effects using flat images, and these are less effective. Still, I admire the effort that went into a pan across the cityscape, which starts with a projected image of nighttime traffic from overhead, only to move across obvious photos and illustrations of buildings, though some are in the foregrounds, which allows for a parallax effect. It isn’t convincing, but it is interesting. An obvious illustration of the exterior of the Paige mansion is far less effective.
The Flame ends where it began, and in a manner that was a bit too sappy for my taste. That said, there was much to enjoy before the conclusion. This also finally means the end of Ralston’s letter, a document so long that I can only imagine Carroll has finished reading it sometime in February. Even if he dies before he’s done reading it, at least he won’t be subjected to any more lines like “My mind was a welter of confusion.” It is hard to believe the same person who wrote the screenplay to The Flame also had to have written the letter threaded throughout the runtime. It makes me glad this was a movie and not a novel, lest the whole thing be written like this.
Dir: John H. Auer
Starring John Carroll, Vera Ralston, Robert Paige, Broderick Crawford
Watched as part of Kino Lorber’s blu-ray box set Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema XXV