Monkey Shines (sometimes called Monkey Shines: An Experiment in Fear) is an American thriller film originally released in 1988. Written and directed by George A. Romero ("Night of the Living Dead", "Creepshow"), the film is based on a novel by the same title authored by Michael Stewart. It was filmed on location in and around Pittsburgh.
Monkey Shines tells the story of an athlete, Alan Mann, who is rendered quadriplegic when struck by a truck. Mann fails to adjust to his condition, becoming suicidal and despondent. When a scientist friend of his (portrayed by John Pankow), who has been experimenting with the injection of human brain tissue into monkeys, learns this, he is prompted to supply one of the experimental monkeys, named "Ella" (portrayed by Boo, whose sounds are provided by Frank Welker), to Alan as a helper.
Their relationship is amicable at first, with Mann's life being made much easier, and the two bond deeply, even sharing "romantic" moments with sweet music. But soon their interaction takes a decidedly sinister turn. The monkey seems to become a telepathic receptacle for Mann's anger at his state and his desire for revenge against friends and family for slights both real and imagined. Simultaneously, Mann develops a romantic relationship with Melanie (Kate McNeil), a specialist in quadriplegia and helper monkeys.
The film contains a rare example of an intimate love scene with a severely handicapped protagonist.
Ella's protectiveness turns to savage jealousy even as Alan is informed that his condition may be reversible. First, Ella kills Alan's jealous and unappreciated mother (Joyce Van Patten), by electrocuting her in the bathtub. Then, Ella kills the scientist, by injecting him with the very syringe of poison he had intended to use on her, and disables Melanie, before trying to light her on fire. Alan, helpless and alone, is able to summon the strength to turn on the tape player with the romantic music, summoning Ella to cuddle close to him. When Ella cradles Alan's head, Alan, painfully betraying Ella's trust, bites into her neck with his teeth, and then thrashes his head back and forth, hitting Ella into the handles of his wheelchair before finally relinquishing his bite and throwing her toward the open deck of his tape machine, killing Ella.
The movie ends with Alan undergoing surgery to restore his mobility, after which he walks using the aid of crutches.
Isle of the Dead (German: Die Toteninsel) is the best known painting of Swiss Symbolist artist Arnold Böcklin (1827-1901). Prints of the work were very popular in central Europe in the early 20th century — Vladimir Nabokov observed that they were to be "found in every Berlin home." Böcklin produced several different versions of the mysterious painting between 1880 and 1886.
The "Basel" version, 1880
All versions of Isle of the Dead depict a desolate and rocky islet seen across an expanse of dark water. A small rowboat is just arriving at a water gate and seawall on shore. An oarsman maneuvers the boat from the stern. In the bow, facing the gate, is a female figure clad entirely in white which stands upright just behind her husband's white, festooned coffin. The tiny islet is dominated by a dense grove of tall, dark cypress trees — associated by long-standing tradition with cemeteries and mourning — which is closely hemmed in by precipitous cliffs. Furthering the funerary theme are what appear to be sepulchral portals and windows penetrating the rock faces. The overall impression conveyed by the imagery is one of both hopeless desolation and tense expectation.
Böcklin himself provided no public explanation as to the meaning of the painting, though he did describe it as “a dream picture: it must produce such a stillness that one would be awed by a knock on the door.” The title, which was conferred upon it by the art dealer Fritz Gurlitt in 1883, was not specified by Böcklin, though it does derive from a phrase in an 1880 letter he sent to the painting’s original commissioner. Not knowing the history of the early versions of the painting (see below), many observers have interpreted the oarsman as representing the boatman Charon who conducted souls to the underworld in Greek mythology. The water would then be either the River Styx or the River Acheron and his white-clad passenger a recently deceased soul transiting to the afterlife.
The "New York" version 1880
Isle of the Dead evokes, in part, the English Cemetery in Florence, Italy, where the first three versions were painted. The cemetery was close to Böcklin's studio and was also where his infant daughter Maria was buried. (In all, Böcklin lost 8 of his 14 children.)
The model for the rocky islet was likely Pondikonisi, a small island near Corfu which is adorned with a small chapel amid a cypress grove.. (Another, less likely candidate is the island of Ponza in the Tyrrhenian Sea.)
Greek island of Pondikonisi
Böcklin painted five versions of Isle of the Dead from 1880 to 1886. The versions become progressively more developed with a lightening sky in the background.
Böcklin completed the first version of the painting in May 1880 for his patron Alexander Günther, but kept it himself. In April 1880, while still working on it, Böcklin's Florence studio had been visited by Marie Berna (widow of financier Dr.Georg von Berna [1836-65] and soon-to-be wife of the German politician Waldemar, Count of Oriola [1854-1910]). She was struck by the first version of this "dream image" (now in the Kunstmuseum Basel), which sat half completed on the easel, so Böcklin painted a smaller version on wood for her (now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York City). At Berna's request, he added the coffin and female figure, in allusion to her husband's death of diphtheria years earlier. Subsequently, he added these elements to the earlier painting. He called these works Die Gräberinsel ("Tomb Island"). (Sometimes the "Basel" version is credited as the first one, sometimes the "New York".)
The third version was painted in 1883 for Böcklin’s dealer Fritz Gurlitt. Beginning with this version, one of the burial chambers in the rocks on the right bears Böcklin's own initials: "A.B.". (In 1933, this version was put up for sale and a noted Böcklin admirer, Adolf Hitler, acquired it. He hung it first at the Berghof in Obersalzberg and, then after 1940, in the New Reich Chancellery in Berlin. It is now at the Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin.)
Financial imperatives resulted in a fourth version in 1884, which was ultimately acquired by the entrepreneur and art collector Baron Heinrich Thyssen and hung at his Berliner Bank subsidiary. It was burned after a bomb attack during World War II and survives only as a black-and-white photograph.
A fifth version was commissioned in 1886 by the Museum of Fine Arts, Leipzig, where it still hangs.
Fifth version, 1886
In 1888, Böcklin created a painting called Die Lebensinsel ("Isle of Life"). Probably intended as an antipole to the Isle of the Dead, it also shows a small island, but with all signs of joy and life. Together with the first version of the Isle of the Dead, this painting is part of the collection of the Kunstmuseum Basel.
"Isle of life"
Isle of the Dead proved extremely popular in the early 20th century; Freud, Lenin, and Clemenceau all had prints of it in their offices.
Works inspired by Isle of the Dead
Paintings
As is self-evident, Salvador Dalí's 1932 painting The Real Picture of the Isle of the Dead by Arnold Böcklin at the Hour of the Angelus is inspired by Böcklin's work.
The Swiss artist H. R. Giger created a version of the picture, Hommage à Böcklin (1977), in his typical "biomechanical" style.
Theater
August Strindberg's play The Ghost Sonata (1907) ends with the image of Isle of the Dead accompanied by melancholy music. It was one of Strindberg's favorite pictures.
Films
Val Lewton's 1945 horror film Isle of the Dead was inspired by the painting which serves as a backdrop to the picture's title sequence. In an earlier film, I Walked with a Zombie (1943), Lewton had also alluded to it, placing it quite visibly on a wall in one scene. Lewton had been fascinated and terrified by a replica as a child.
The painting is the explicit backdrop for Norman McLaren's short animated film A Little Phantasy on a 19th-century Painting (1946).
The Quay Brothers' 2005 film The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes is said to be inspired by the painting, as well as by the book The Invention of Morel by Bioy Casares. Some of the scenery in the film (shot in a studio in Leipzig) is particularly reminiscent of the Leipzig version of the painting.
Literature
Heinrich Mann's 1903 novel Die Göttinnen oder Die drei Romane der Herzogin von Assy (The Goddesses, or The Three Novels of the Duchess of Assy) uses the painting's imagery without explicitly mentioning it.
In Vladimir Nabokov's Mary (1970; English translation of Mashen'ka [Машенька, 1926]) it is mentioned that a copy of The Isle of the Dead hangs in the room occupied by Klara.
In Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s 1952 novella Der Richter und sein Henker (The Judge and His Hangman), the painting is mentioned and functions as a harbinger of doom.
In J.G. Ballard's 1966 novel The Crystal World, Böcklin's second version of the painting is invoked to describe the gloom of the opening scene at Port Matarre.
Roger Zelazny used the picture as an inspiration for the meeting place of two mythological antagonists in his novel Isle of the Dead (1969).
A French graphic novel in five tomes, L'île des morts, was published on the Böcklin painting's theme with a strong influence of writer H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos by the editor Vents d’Ouest at Issy Les Moulineaux, in 1996.
The Italian illustrator Milo Manara also depict this painting in one of his graphic novels (Au revoir les étoiles) in which the main character revives classical paintings.
Bernard Cornwell's The Warlord Chronicles (1995-97) associates Dorset's Isle of Portland with the painting's isle. It is described as a place of internal exile and damnation. The causeway that almost links the real-life island to the mainland was supposed to be guarded to keep the "dead" (including the criminally insane) from crossing the Fleet and escaping back into Britain (a bit of literary conjecture in this historical fiction, not archaeological fact).
In 1998 the Italian writer Franco Ricciardello won the Urania Award with a novel (Ai Margini del Caos, Aux frontières du chaos) whose plot revolves around a mystery involving the different versions of the painting.
The German novelist Thomas Lehr (b. 1957) mentioned the painting as hanging in a hospital room in his Nabokov's Cat (1999).
The 5th version of the painting serves as appropriate cover art for German writer Lena Falkenhagen's novel Die Boroninsel (Boron Island).
In 2008, the painting is used as one of the dreamlike setting for the comic novel Sognare, forse morire, Volume 118 of the Series Julia. Written by Giancarlo Berardi and Maurizio Mantero, Graphic by Laura Zuccheri.
Music
The Island of the Dead (1890) is a symphonic poem by Romantic composer Heinrich Schülz-Beuthen evoking the painting.
Sergei Rachmaninoff also composed a symphonic poem, Isle of the Dead, Op. 29 (1909), inspired by the painting.
One of the four tone poems of German composer Max Reger’s Vier Tondichtungen nach Böcklin (Op 128, 1913) is “Die Totensel” (No. 3), based on the painting. (The same year, Reger’s disciple Fritz Lubrich, Junior [1888-1971] composed Drei Romantische Tonstücke nach Böcklinschen Bildern (Three Romantic Tonstücke after Böcklin’s Pictures; Op 37), an organ work of which No. 3 is also The Dead Island.)
The Swedish neoclassical band Arcana used an image of Isle of the Dead on the cover of their debut album Dark Age of Reason.
Anime
From the anime Kuroshitsuji (黒執事, Black Butler) by Yana Toboso, Sebastian Michaelis (セバスチャン・ミカエリス ,Sebasuchan Mikaerisu) ferried the soul of Ciel Phantomhive (シエル・ファントムハイヴ ,Shieru Fantomuhaivu) to the Isle of the Dead. Sebastian hands Ciel Tanaka's diary, in which Tanaka details the former Lord Phantomhive's knowledge of his impending death. Sebastian carrying Ciel enters the isle and there Ciel calmly waits for Sebastian to take his soul.
Video/computer games
A downloadable map for the computer game Aliens versus Predator 2 is based on the Isle of the Dead.
The painting appears as a location in the Pocket PC graphical adventure game, Fade.
Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins, also released as Remo: Unarmed and Dangerous, is a 1985 American film. The action/adventure film featured Fred Ward, Joel Grey and Kate Mulgrew. It was directed by Guy Hamilton. The character is based on The Destroyer pulp paperback series (later Destroyer books actually make fun of the film and its promotional materials). The movie was the only one on the big screen featuring the character Remo Williams, and faired poorly in theaters. The film received mixed reviews from critics, although it did give Joel Grey a Golden Globe nomination. The film and a Remo Williams television pilot both had Dick Clark as an executive producer.
Samuel Edward "Sam" Makin (played by Fred Ward) is a tough street cop recruited as a secret agent through a bizarre method: his death is faked so that there will be no questions asked as to his disappearance. Rechristened "Remo Williams" (after the name and location of the manufacturer of the bedpan in Makin's hospital room), his face is surgically altered and he is trained to be a human killing machine by his aged Korean martial arts master Chiun (played by Grey in heavy makeup). Though Remo's training is extremely rushed by Chiun's standards, Remo learns such skills as dodging bullets and running (not walking) on water. The Chiun character, who is stereotypically nationalistic, racist and sexist, is both the comic relief and wise mentor figure in the film. Chiun and Remo practice a fictional form of Korean martial arts named Sinanju. Remo is sent to investigate a corrupt weapons procurement program within the US Army.
In the States The Destroyer is a massive franchise of paperback novels, and Charles Roven and Steve Chasman, producers, respectively, of The Dark Knight and the Transporter films, are aiming to bring Remo back. THR's Risky Business blog reports that the project is being set up between Columbia and Sony.
Incredibly there are, to date, about 150 novels in the Destroyer series, which was begun in the early 70s by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir, and continued by multiple authors.
The overall concept is that Remo Williams, a cop from Newark, is framed and sentenced to death, and then rescued and turned into a super ninja spy by a secret society begun by President Kennedy. A bit like Torchwood but without the aliens. He is trained in a mental invented martial art called Sinanju by the Mr Miyagi character Chiun, earning the ability to dodge bullets and walk on sand without leaving footprints.
The original film starred hunky Fred Ward as Remo and Joel Grey (the creepy MC from Cabaret) as Chiun. Captain Janeway was in it too. The director, fittingly given the Bond-ish potential of the series, was Guy Hamilton (Goldfinger, Live and Let Die).
It was daft but a lot of fun, and had a cliffhanging setpiece on an extremely fake looking Statue of Liberty. The American title was The Adventure Begins, which was a tad unfortunate since the series never went anywhere. There was a TV pilot in the late 80s, but it wasn't picked up.
The Quiet Man is a 1952 American romantic drama film directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne, Maureen O'Hara, Victor McLaglen and Barry Fitzgerald. It was based on a 1933 Saturday Evening Post short story by Maurice Walsh. The film is notable for its lush photography of the Irish countryside and the long, climactic, semi-comic fist fight between Wayne and McLaglen.
Set in 1920s Ireland, Sean Thornton (John Wayne), an Irish-American from Pittsburgh, returns to Ireland to reclaim his family's farm in Innisfree. He meets and falls in love with the fiery Mary Kate Danaher (Maureen O'Hara), the spinster sister of the bullying, loud-mouthed landowner "Red" Will Danaher (Victor McLaglen). Danaher, angry that Sean outbid him for the Thornton land adjacent to his property, initially refuses to sanction the marriage until several town locals, including the parish priest, conspire to trick him into believing that the wealthy Widow Tillane wants to marry him, but only if Mary Kate is no longer living in the house. After learning the truth on Sean and Mary Kate's wedding day, an enraged Will refuses to give his sister her full dowry.
Sean, unschooled in Irish customs, cares nothing about the dowry, but Mary Kate is obsessed with obtaining it, the dowry representing her independence, identity, and pride. Angered and shamed by Sean's refusal to confront her brother and demand what is legally hers, she brands him a coward, and, despite living together, they are estranged as husband and wife. The truth about Sean, however, is known only to one other person in the village, the Church of Ireland minister Rev. Playfair (Arthur Shields). Sean is a former boxer in the United States, a heavy weight champion known as "Trooper Thorn." After accidentally killing an opponent in the ring, Sean hung up his gloves, vowing never to fight again.
Later, in an attempt to force Sean to confront Will Danaher, Mary Kate leaves him and boards a train departing Castletown and headed to Dublin; Ireland's Capital. Infuriated, Sean arrives and drags her off the train, and, followed by the townspeople, forces her to walk the five miles to Innisfree from Castletown to Will Danaher's farm. Sean demands that Will hand over her dowry. Will finally relents and gives him the cash. Mary Kate and Sean throw it into a furnace, showing that Mary Kate never cared about the money, but only that Sean stand up for his wife. Sean and Will slug it out through the village, stop for a drink, brawl again, then become best friends. Sean regains Mary Kate's love and respect. Will Danaher and the Widow Tillane begin courting, and peace returned to Innisfree.
The film was something of a departure for Wayne and Ford, who were both known mostly for Westerns and other action-oriented films. It was also a departure for Republic Pictures, which backed Ford in what was considered a risky venture at the time. It was the first time the studio, known for low budget B-movies, released a film receiving an Oscar nomination, the only Best Picture nomination the studio would ever garner.
Ford read the story in 1933 and soon purchased the rights to it for $10. Republic Pictures agreed to finance the film with O'Hara and Wayne with Ford directing, only if all three agreed to film a western with Republic. All agreed and after filming Rio Grande they headed for Ireland to start shooting.
One of the conditions that Republic Pictures placed on John Ford was that the film came in at under two hours total running time. The finished picture was two hours and fifteen minutes. When screening the film for Republic Studio executives, Ford stopped the film at approximately two hours in: on the verge of the climactic fight between Wayne and McLaglen. Republic executives relented and allowed the film to run its full length. It was one of the few films that Republic filmed in Technicolor; most of the studio's other color films were made in a more economical process known as Trucolor.
The film employed many actors from the Irish theatre, including Barry Fitzgerald's brother, Arthur Shields, as well as extras from the Irish countryside, and it is one of the few Hollywood movies in which spoken Gaelic can be heard.
The story is set in Innisfree, a city in Lough Gill, County Sligo. Many scenes for the film were actually shot in and around the village of Cong, County Mayo and on the grounds of Cong's Ashford Castle. Cong is now a wealthy small town and the castle a 5-star luxury hotel. The connections with the film have led to the area becoming a tourist attraction. The Quiet Man Fan Club hold their annual general meeting in Ashford Castle each year.
The film also presents John Ford's depiction of an idealized Irish society, with Catholics and Protestants living in harmony, and no social divisions based on class or religion. The Catholic priest Father Lonergan and the Protestant Rev. Playfair maintain a strong friendly relationship throughout the film.
The famous kissing scene between John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara is shown in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) when E.T. watches television. E.T. is interested and, moved by the scene, his telepathic contact with Elliot causes the boy to re-enact it while he is at school.
Moon is a 2009 science fiction/thriller film about a solitary lunar employee who finds that he may not be able to go home to Earth so easily. The film is the feature film debut of commercial director Duncan Jones, and actor Sam Rockwell stars as the lunar employee. Kevin Spacey voices his robot companion.
Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is an employee contracted by the company Lunar Industries to extract helium-3, which has reversed Earth's energy crisis. Sam is stationed at the lunar base Sarang with only a robot named Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey), but two weeks before completing his three-year assignment, he begins to hallucinate. An extraction goes wrong and he wakes up, not knowing how he got there, and Sam begins to realise Lunar's plans to replace him when he finds a younger, angrier, version of himself.
Moon is the first feature film directed by commercial director Duncan Jones, who co-wrote the script with Nathan Parker.
The film was specifically written as a vehicle for actor Sam Rockwell and pays homage to the films of Jones's youth, such as Silent Running (1972), Alien (1979) and Outland (1981).
Jones described the intent, "We wanted to create something which felt comfortable within that canon of those science fiction films from the sort of late seventies to early eighties."
The director spoke of his interest in the lunar setting, "For me, the Moon has this weird mythic nature to it... There is still a mystery to it. As a location, it bridges the gap between science-fiction and science fact. We (humankind) have been there. It is something so close and so plausible and yet at the same time, we really don't know that much about it."
The director described the lack of romance in the Moon as a location, citing images from the Japanese lunar orbiter SELENE, "It's the desolation and emptiness of it... it looks like some strange ball of clay in blackness... Look at photos and you'll think that they're monochrome. In fact, they're not. There simply are no primary colours." Jones referenced the photography book Full Moon by Michael Light in designing the look of the film.
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is a 2004 American pulp adventure, science fiction film written and directed by Kerry Conran in his directorial debut. The film is set in an alternative 1939 and follows the adventures of Polly Perkins (Gwyneth Paltrow), a newspaper reporter for The Chronicle, and H. Joseph "Joe" Sullivan (Jude Law), known as "Sky Captain", as they try to track down and stop the mysterious "Dr. Totenkopf".
Conran spent four years making a black and white teaser trailer with a bluescreen set up in his living room and using a Macintosh IIci personal computer. He was able to get producer Jon Avnet to see it, who was so impressed that he spent two years working with the aspiring filmmaker on his screenplay. None of the major studios were interested in financing such an unusual film with a first-time director. Avnet convinced Aurelio De Laurentiis to finance Sky Captain without a distribution deal.
Almost 100 digital artists, modelers, animators and compositors created the multi-layered 2D and 3D backgrounds for the live-action footage while the entire movie was sketched out via hand-drawn storyboards and then re-created as computer-generated 3D animatics. Ten months before Conran made the movie with his actors, he shot it entirely with stand-ins in Los Angeles and then created the whole movie in animatics so that the actors had an idea of what the film would look like and where to move on the soundstage.
In 1994, Conran set up a bluescreen in his living room and began assembling the tools he would need to create his movie. He was not interested in working his way through the system and instead wanted to follow the route of independent filmmakers like Steven Soderbergh. Initially, Kerry and his brother had nothing more than "just a vague idea of this guy who flew a plane. We would talk about all the obvious things like Indiana Jones and all the stuff we liked." Conran spent four years making a black and white teaser trailer in the style of an old-fashion movie serial on his Macintosh IIci personal computer. Once he was finished, Conran showed it to producer Marsha Oglesby, who was a friend of his brother's wife and she recommended that he let producer Jon Avnet see it. Conran met Avnet and showed him the trailer. Conran told him that he wanted to make it into a movie. They spent two or three days just talking about the tone of the movie.
Fifteen years after his death, Laurence Olivier once again received star billing in a film. Through the use of computer graphics, footage of him as a young man was integrated into the film in which Olivier "play" the villain Dr. Totenkopf.
Conran was influenced by the designs of Norman Bel Geddes, an industrial designer who did work for the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair and designed exhibits for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Geddes also designed an airship that was to fly from Chicago to London.
Another key influence was Hugh Ferriss, one of the designers for the 1939 World’s Fair who designed bridges and huge housing complexes. He was an American delineator (one who creates perspective drawings of buildings) and architect. In 1922, skyscraper architect Harvey Wiley Corbett commissioned Ferriss to draw a series of four step-by-step perspectives demonstrating the architectural consequences of the zoning law. These four drawings would later be used in his 1929 book The Metropolis of Tomorrow (Dover Publications, 2005).
Regarding the 1939 New York World’s Fair itself and its futuristic theme of the World of Tomorrow, Conran noted: "...obviously the title refers to the World Expo and the spirit of that was looking at the future with a sense of optimism and a sense of the whimsical, you know, something that we've lost a lot in our fantasies. We're more cynical, more practical... I think what this film attempts to do is to take that enthusiasm and innocence and celebrate it-to not get mired in the practicality that we're fixated upon today."
Conran also acknowledged his debt to German Expressionism, which was particularly evident in the opening scenes in New York City: "Early German cinema was born of just a completely different aesthetic than what we see nowadays. One of the last things I watched before starting this project was the Dr. Mabuse series that Lang had done - terribly inspirational, the use of art and propaganda even."
Conran summed up what influenced him in making Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow: "We tried to approach it almost as though we lived in that era and were just another group of artists trying to make a work out of those pieces and inspirations. We wanted the film to feel like a lost film of that era. If we're a footnote in the history of pulp art and Golden Age comics, that'd be enough, that'd be great. If we even just inspire some people to go back and investigate some of that stuff, we'd have done enough."
Sky Captain has a number of commonalities with the famous Hayao Miyazaki animation Laputa: Castle in the Sky. The sky pirates, focus on primitive mechanics, large airships, and military cultures are similar. Of particular note are the robots in both films with the slinky arms and one eyes that are identical. Both stories center on an evil madman with control over an island of high technology and the search for that island. Laputa has the evil madman searching for the island while Sky Captain has the island as the base of the madman from the beginning. Sky Captain is also different in its message which is largely about the film genre while Laputa has strong anti-war & anti-technology themes found in most of Miyazaki's work. Additionally, both the Hayao Miyazaki film and Sky Captain pay homage to the 1941 Superman Cartoon The Mechanical Monsters.
Der Richter und sein Henker (English: The Judge and His Hangman) is a novella by the Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt written in 1950 and first published in English in 1955, in a translation by Therese Pol. A new translation by Joel Agee appeared in 2006, published together with Suspicion as The Inspector Bärlach Mysteries, with a foreword by Sven Birkerts. Together with Dürrenmatt's The Pledge: Requiem for the Detective Novel, these stories are considered classics of crime fiction, fusing existential philosophy and the detective genre.
Der Richter und sein Henker was made into a 1975 film titled End of the Game directed by Maximilian Schell, with screenplay by Dürrenmatt and Schell. Jon Voight took lead billing as Walter Tschanz, with Martin Ritt as Hans Bärlach and Robert Shaw as Richard Gastmann. Jacqueline Bisset and Friedrich Dürrenmatt also appeared in the film, and Donald Sutherland played the role of the corpse of Lt. Schmeid. German silent film actress Lil Dagover made her last screen appearance before retirement in the film. The film was also reissued as Getting Away With Murder, Murder on the Bridge and Deception.
The main character is Commissar Bärlach of the Bernese police, who is dying of cancer and must solve the murder of his best officer, Lieutenant Ulrich Schmied. Bärlach is assisted in his investigation by officer Walter Tschanz. As Schmied had been investigating the crimes of Richard Gastmann, a career master criminal who is an old friend and enemy of Bärlach's, suspicion immediately falls upon Gastmann. But Bärlach and Tschanz's "investigation" of Gastmann yields an unexpected twist after Tschanz kills Gastmann, supposedly in self-defense. Bärlach then reveals that he has known all along that Tschanz is the one who murdered Schmied.
Tschanz had purposefully killed Gastmann so that Gastmann would be forever blamed for Schmied's murder. Furthermore, Bärlach had manipulated Tschanz into this action with the manner in which Bärlach had pressed forward with their seeming investigation of Gastmann. Bärlach had deliberately pushed Tschanz toward a final, fatal confrontation with Gastmann, resulting in Gastmann's death: the punishment Bärlach considers just for all of the previous crimes Gastmann had committed, but which Bärlach had been unable to prove.
In fact, Gastmann and Bärlach went back forty years. They had long ago made a personal bet with one another as to whether it was possible to commit the "perfect" crime, such that even an investigator who personally witnessed it would never be able to prove the perpetrator guilty. After that bet, Gastmann, as Bärlach well knew, had pursued a lifelong career as a purveyor of crime, evil in its comprehensiveness, arrogant and mocking of civilization itself. And indeed he always remained one step ahead of Bärlach's tireless but fruitless efforts to convict him. Gastmann remembered to Bärlach: "I wanted to prove that it was possible to commit a crime that couldn't be solved." Gastmann had been correct, and Bärlach's final plot is an acknowledgment thereof. By murdering Schmied during Schmied's investigation of Gastmann, Tschanz had ruined the terminally ill Bärlach's final chance to bring Gastmann to justice in a courtroom. Therefore, using Tschanz as a pawn, Bärlach finds an alternate method to mete out the justice for which he feels Gastmann is overdue.
The central question of this book is whether or not it is right to frame a person for a crime they didn't commit, if they've committed another crime that was never proven. Bärlach affirms the question when he says to Gastmann: "I couldn't prove that it was you who committed the first crime, but I am transferring this crime to you" — therefore, Gastmann, the very embodiment of evil criminality, was finally punished.
The interplay between Bärlach and Tschanz takes on a symbolic dimension. Tschanz, the ambitious underling, insists on the efficacy of modern, scientific crime-solving methods "from the Chicago school". Bärlach is skeptical, relying instead on his deep knowledge of human motives, born of lifelong experience. While Tschanz's methods make ostensible progress on the case, ultimately, it is Bärlach's intuitive sense that has long since enabled him to determine the truth, and also enables him to use Tschanz to settle his old score with Gastmann.
One can understand the novella also as question: "When humans determine themselves the fate of others they become the judges and when they become the instrument of others they become the henchmen." Having been set up by Bärlach to kill Gastmann, Tschanz says to Bärlach at the end of the story, "Then you were the judge and I the hangman". Tschanz then kills himself.
Hoffman is a 1970 British film directed by Alvin Rakoff and starring Peter Sellers, Sinéad Cusack, Jennifer Ruth Dunning and Jeremy Bulloch.
Hoffman is the tale of an older man, played by Peter Sellers, who invites a young lady to his flat in England for a sexual liaison. As the film progresses, it is revealed that Sellers' character caught one of his workers dealing in a scam, and decided to blackmail the man's lovely fiancée away for a weekend to convince her to fall in love with him. Mostly a drama, the film has an almost terrifying performance by Sellers, involved in intricate mind games with the other protagonists.
Reportedly, Sellers despised Hoffman because the lead character too closely reflected his own personality.
Notable for the haunting music by Ron Grainer, and as one of Sellers' few 'straight' performances.
"Waters of March" (Portuguese: "Águas de Março") is a Brazilian song composed by Antonio Carlos Jobim. Jobim wrote both the English and Portuguese lyrics. When writing the English lyrics, Jobim endeavoured to avoid words with Latin roots, which resulted in the English version having more verses than the Portuguese. Another way in which the English lyrics differ from the Portuguese is that the English version treats March from the perspective of an observer in the northern hemisphere. In this context, the waters are the "waters of defrost" in contrast to the rains referred to in the original Portuguese, marking the end of summer and the beginning of the colder season in the southern hemisphere.
In 2001, "Águas de Março" was named as the all-time best Brazilian song in a poll of more than 200 Brazilian journalists, musicians and other artists conducted by Brazil's leading daily newspaper, Folha de São Paulo.
The song lyrics, originally written in Portuguese, do not tell a story, but rather present a series of images that form a collage; nearly every line starts with "É..." ("[It] is...").
In both the Portuguese and English versions of the lyrics, "it" is a stick, a stone, a sliver of glass, a scratch, a cliff, a knot in the wood, a fish, a pin, the end of the road," and many other things, although some specific references to Brazilian culture (festa da cumeeira, garrafa de cana), flora (peroba do campo) and folklore (Matita Pereira) were intentionally omitted from the English version, perhaps with the goal of providing a more universal perspective. All these details swirling around the central metaphor of "the waters of March" can give the impression of the passing of daily life and its continual, inevitable progression towards death, just as the rains of March mark the end of a Brazilian summer. Both sets of lyrics speak of the water being "the promise of life," perhaps allowing for other, more life-affirming interpretations, and the English contains the additional phrases "the joy in your heart" and the "promise of spring," a seasonal reference that would be more relevant to most of the English-speaking world.
The inspiration for "Águas de Março" comes from Rio de Janeiro's rainiest month. March is typically marked by sudden storms with heavy rains and strong winds that cause flooding in many places around the city. The lyrics and the music have a constant downward progression much like the water torrent from those rains flowing in the gutters, which typically would carry sticks, stones, bits of glass, and almost everything and anything. The orchestration creates the illusion of the constant descending of notes much like Shepard tones.
The song was used by Coca-Cola for a jingle in the mid-1980s concurrent with the "Coke is it!" campaign, which ran until 1988, and is currently the track for a 2008 British Gas advert in the UK and in Italy. In the Philippines, it was also used in the early 90s as the soundtrack for an advertising campaign for the newly developed Ayala Center.
Composer-guitarist Oscar Castro-Neves relates that Jobim told him that writing in this kind of stream of consciousness was his version of therapy and saved him thousands in psychoanalysis bills.
Prof. Charles A. Perrone, an authority on contemporary Brazilian popular music (MPB), wrote about the song in his doctoral dissertation (1985), an abridged version of which was published in Brazil as Letras e Letras da MPB (1988). He notes such sources for the song as the folkloric samba-de-matuto and a classic poem of pre-Modernist Brazilian literature.
Moonraker was released on June 26, 1979, in the United Kingdom and was released three days later in the United States, grossing $70,308,099 in the UK. It opened in 788 theaters, grossing a total of $210,308,099 worldwide. In mainland Europe the most common month of release was in August 1979, opening in the Scandinavian countries of Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden between the 13 and 18 August. Moonraker was released in Kenya on 27 August 1979. Given that the film was produced in France and involved some notable French actors, the French premiere for the film was relatively late, released there on 10 October 1979.
Moonraker is the eleventh spy film in the James Bond series, and the fourth to star Roger Moore as the fictional MI6 agent James Bond. The film, directed by Lewis Gilbert, co-stars Lois Chiles, Michael Lonsdale, Corinne Clery, and Richard Kiel. In the film, Bond is sent to investigate the mysterious theft of a space shuttle, leading him to Hugo Drax, the billionaire owner of the shuttle-manufacturing firm. Along with the space scientist Dr. Holly Goodhead, who later is identified as also being a Central Intelligence Agency agent investigating Mr. Drax, Bond follows the trail of clues from California to Venice, Italy, Rio de Janeiro, and the Amazon rain forest, and finally into outer space in a bid to prevent a genocidal plot to wipe out the world population and to re-create humanity with a master race.
Moonraker was intended by its creator Ian Fleming to be turned into a film even before he completed the novel in 1954, since he based the novel on a manuscript he had written even earlier than this. The producers of the James Bond film series had originally intended to do Moonraker in 1973 with Roger Moore making his debut as Bond, but the making of this movie was put on hold and finally released in 1979, coinciding with the science fiction genre which had become extremely popular during this period with films such as Star Wars (1977).
Derek Meddings, a long-time contributor to the James Bond series, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects for the special effects used in this movie and its space scenes.
Moonraker was the highest grossing film of the series until the Pierce Brosnan Bond film GoldenEye. Moonraker earned a total of $210,300,000 world wide - surpassing the earlier Bond movie The Spy Who Loved Me (1977). Moonraker was also noted for its high production cost for a Bond film, spending almost twice as much money as the preceding James Bond movie The Spy Who Loved Me.
Ian Fleming had originally intended the novel, published in 1954, to be made into a film even before he began writing it and was based on an original manuscript of a screenplay which had been on his mind for years. In 1955, the film rights to Moonraker were initially sold to John Payne of the Rank Organisation for £10,000 (£188,775 present value), paying a $1000 a month option for nine months. Payne was the first person interested in making the novels into a film series, but later rejected the idea based on the fact it wouldn't be possible for him to obtain the rights to the entire 007 series. In spring 1959, due to on-going difficulties, Fleming eventually bought back the rights for his novels, shortly before selling them to Harry Saltzman. As with several previous Bond films, the story from Fleming's novel is almost entirely dispensed with, and little more than the name of Hugo Drax was used in film, in favour of a film more in keeping with the era of science fiction. The 2002 Bond film Die Another Day makes further use of some ideas and character names from the novel. Tom Mankiewicz had written a full screenplay of Moonraker that was eventually partly discarded. According to Mankiewicz footage shot at Drax's lairs was considerably more detailed than the edited result in the final version. The crew had shot a scene with Drax meeting his co-financiers in his jungle lair and they used the same chamber room below the space shuttle launch pad that Bond and Goodhead eventually escape from. This scene was shot but later cut out. Another scene involving Bond and Goodhead in a meditation room aboard Drax's space station, was shot but never used in the final film. However press stills were released of the scene which featured on Topps trading cards in 1979 as was a theatrical trailer which featured Bond punching Jaws in the face aboard the space station, neither of which featured in the complete film. Some scenes from Mankiewicz's script were later used in subsequent films, including the Acrostar Jet sequence used in the pre-credit sequence for Octopussy, and the Eiffel Tower scene in A View to a Kill. In March 2004, an Internet hoax stated rumours about a lost 1956 version of Moonraker by Orson Welles, and a James Bond web site repeated it on April Fool's Day in 2004 as a hoax.
Supposedly, this recently discovered lost film was 40 minutes of raw footage with Dirk Bogarde as Bond, Welles as Drax, and Peter Lorre as Drax's henchman. A film poster was created displaying the actors and the title of the film.
The role of the villain, Hugo Drax, was originally offered to James Mason. However well-established French actor Michael Lonsdale was cast as the billionaire Drax, partly due to his fluency in English, and Corinne Clery for the part of Corinne Dufour, given that the film was produced in France. American actress Lois Chiles had originally been offered the role of Anya Amasova in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), but had turned down the part when she decided to take temporary retirement. Chiles was cast as Holly Goodhead by chance, when she was given the seat next to Lewis Gilbert on a flight and he believed she would be ideal for the role as the CIA scientist. Drax's henchman Chang, played by Japanese aikido instructor Toshiro Suga, was recommended for the role by executive producer Michael G. Wilson, who was one of his pupils. In Moonraker, Wilson also continued a tradition in the Bond films he started in the film Goldfinger where he has a small cameo role. He appears twice in the film, first as a tourist outside the Venini Glass shop and museum in Venice, then at the end of the film as a technician in Drax's control room.
The Jaws character, played by Richard Kiel makes a return, although in Moonraker the role is played more for comedic effect than in The Spy Who Loved Me. Jaws was intended to be a villain against Bond to the bitter end, but director Lewis Gilbert stated on the DVD documentary that he received so much fan mail from small children saying "Why can't Jaws be a goodie not a baddie", that as a result he was persuaded to make Jaws gradually become Bond's ally at the end of the film.
Production began on August 14, 1978. Main shooting was switched from the usual 007 Stage at Pinewood Studios to France, due to high taxation in England at the time. Only the cable car interiors and space battle exteriors were filmed at Pinewood. The massive sets of Moonraker designed by Ken Adam were the largest ever constructed in France and required more than 222,000 man-hours to construct (roughly 1000 hours by each of the crew on average). They were shot at three of France's largest film studios in Boulogne-sur-Mer, Epinay and Billancourt. 220 technicians used 100 tonnes of metal, two tonnes of nails and 10,000 feet of wood to build the three-story space station set at Eponay Studios. The elaborate space set for Moonraker holds the world record for having the largest number of zero gravity wires in one scene.The Venetian glass museum and fight between Bond and Chang was shot at Boulogne Studios in a building which had once been a World War II Luftwaffe aircraft factory during Germany's occupation of France. The scene in the Venice glass museum and warehouse holds the record for the largest amount of break-away sugar glass used in a single scene.
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Drax's mansion, set in California, was actually filmed at the Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte, about 55 kilometres (34 mi) southeast of Paris, for the exteriors and Grand Salon. The remaining interiors, including some of the scenes with Corinne Defour and the drawing room, were filmed at the Château de Guermantes.
Much of the film was shot in the cities of London, Paris, Venice, Palmdale and Rio de Janeiro. The production team had considered India and Nepal as a location in the film but on arriving there to investigate they found it inconceivable to write it into the script, particularly with time restrictions to do so. They decided on Rio de Janeiro relatively early on, which Cubby Broccoli had visited on vacation, and a team was sent to the city in early 1978 to capture initial footage from the Mardi Gras festival which featured in the film.
At the Rio de Janeiro location, many months later, Roger Moore arrived several days later than scheduled for shooting due to recurrent health problems and an attack of kidney stones he received in France. After arriving in Rio, he was immediately whisked off the plane and went straight to hair and makeup, before reboarding the plane, to film the sequence with him arriving as James Bond in the film. Sugarloaf Mountain was a prominent location in the film, and during filming of the cable car sequence in which Bond and Goodhead are attacked by Jaws during mid-air transportation high above Rio, stuntman Richard Graydon slipped and narrowly avoided falling to his death. For the scene in which Jaws bites into the steel tramway cable with his teeth, the cable was actually made of liquorice, although Richard Kiel was still required to use his steel dentures.
Iguazu Falls was a natural location depicted in the film, although as stated by Q in the film, the falls were intended to be located somewhere in the upper catchment of the Amazon rather than where the falls are actually located in the south. The second unit had originally planned on sending an actual boat over the falls. However on attempting to release it, the boat became firmly embedded on rocks near the edge. Despite a dangerous attempt by helicopter and rope ladder to retrieve it, the plan had to be abandoned, forcing the second unit to use a miniature at Pinewood instead. The exterior of Drax's pyramid headquarters in the Amazon rain forest near the falls was actually filmed at the Tikal Mayan ruins in Guatemala. The interior of the pyramid, however, was designed by Ken Adam at Pinewood studio in which he purposefully used a shiny coating to make the walls look plastic and false. All of the space center scenes were shot at the Vehicle Assembly Building of Kennedy Space Center, Florida although some of the earlier scenes of the Moonraker assembly plant were filmed on location at the Rockwell International manufacturing facilities in Palmdale, California.
The early scene involving Bond and Jaws in which Bond is pushed out of the aircraft without a parachute took weeks of planning and preparation. The skydiving sequence was coordinated by Don Calvedt under the supervision of second unit director John Glen. Stuntman Jake Lombard was hired to double for Bond, who would later pose as Moore's double in films such as Octopussy and for Necros in The Living Daylights. B. J. Worth, who played the stunt double of Jaws, would also later become a consistent member of the stunt team for aerial sequences throughout the 1980s, into Timothy Dalton's films such as The Living Daylights. Members of the U.S. championship skydiving team aided the stunt team with the planning and the team's master rigger designed a one-inch thick parachute pack that could be concealed beneath the suit to give the impression of the missing parachute. When the stunt men opened their parachutes at the end of every shoot, custom-sewn velcro costume seams would separate to allow the hidden parachutes to open. The skydiver cinematographer used a lightweight Panavision camera, bought from an old pawn shop in Paris, which he had adapted, and attached to his helmet to shoot the entire sequence, The scene took a total of 88 skydives by the stuntmen to complete it.
For the scene involving the opening of the musical electronic laboratory door lock in Venice, producer Albert R. Broccoli requested special permission from director Steven Spielberg to use the five-note leitmotif from his film Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). In 1985, Broccoli would return the favor by fulfilling Spielberg's request to use the James Bond theme music for a scene in his film, The Goonies (1985).
Moonraker was the third of the three Bond films for which the theme song was performed by Shirley Bassey ( following Goldfinger and Diamonds are Forever) Kate Bush and Frank Sinatra were both considered for the vocals, before Johnny Mathis was approached and offered the opportunity. However Mathis, despite having started recording with Barry, was unable to complete the project, leaving producers to offer the song to Bassey within just weeks of the release date. Bassey made the recordings with very short notice and as a result, she never regarded the song 'as her own' as she had never had the chance to perform it or promote it first. The film uses two versions of the title theme song, a ballad version heard over the main titles, and a disco version. Confusingly, the United Artists single release labelled the tracks on the 7" single as "Moonraker (Main Title)" for the version used to close the film and "Moonraker (End Title)" for the track that opened the film. The song made little impact on the charts, reaching 159, partly attributed to Bassey's failure to promote the single, given the last-minute decision to quickly record it to meet the schedule.
Finally in 2005, Bassey sang the song for the first time outside James Bond on stage as part of a medley of her three Bond title songs.
Title sequence is designed by Maurice Binder.
The soundtrack of Moonraker was composed by John Barry and recorded in Paris, again, as with production, marking a turning point away from the English location at CTS Studios in London. The score also marked a turning point in John Barry's output, abandoning the Kentonesque brass of his earlier Bond scores and instead scoring the film with slow, rich string passages - a trend which Barry would continue in the 1980s with scores such as Out of Africa and Somewhere in Time. For Moonraker, Barry uses for the first time since Diamonds Are Forever (1971) a piece of music called "007" (on track 7), the secondary Bond theme composed by Barry which was introduced in From Russia with Love over the end credits. Barry also made use of classical music passages in the film. For the scene where Bond visits Drax in his chateau, Drax plays Frédéric Chopin's Prelude no. 15 in D-flat major (op. 28), "Raindrop") on his grand piano. Tritsch-Tratsch-Polka by Johann Strauss II was featured during the hovercraft scene on the Piazza San Marco in Venice, and Tchaikovsky's "Romeo and Juliet Overture" was used for the scenes in Brazil in which Jaws meets Dolly following his accident. Other passages pay homage to earlier films including Richard Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra (op. 30), associated with 2001: A Space Odyssey) with the hunting horn playing its distinctive first three notes, Elmer Bernstein's theme from The Magnificent Seven when Bond appears on horseback in gaucho clothing at MI6 headquarters in Brazil, and the alien-contacting theme from Close Encounters of the Third Kind as the key-code for a security door as mentioned previously.
Reviewing Moonraker, Danny Peary wrote that “The worst James Bond film to date has Roger Moore walking through the paces for his hefty paycheck and giving way to his double for a series of unimaginative action scenes and “humorous” chases. There’s little suspense and the humor falls flat. Not only is Jaws so pacified by love that he becomes a good guy, but the filmmakers also have the gall to set the finale in outer space and stage a battle right out of Star Wars.”
But other reviews of Moonraker have expressed that the film is one of Moore's stronger films as James Bond. James Berardinelli of Reelviews.net for instance remarked that, "the solid special effects, well-executed action sequences, and a strict reliance upon the 'Bond Formula' keep this film among Moore's better entries." Despite criticism about the far-fetched nature of the plot, websites such as Rotten Tomatoes have awarded the film a 62% "fresh" rating.
Aside from being nominated for an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, the film, given its unusual attention to the science fiction genre than the average James Bond film, received attention from the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films and was nominated for several Saturn Awards in 1980. The nominees were for Best Science Fiction Film, Best Special Effects, and Best Supporting Actor (Richard Kiel). The DVD of the film was later nominated in 2004 for the Golden Satellite Award Best Classic DVD Release. Moonraker won the Golden Screen Award in Germany in 1980.
The exaggerated nature of the plot and space station sequence has seen the film parodied on numerous occasions. Of note is the Austin Powers spoof film The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999) which whilst a parody of other James Bond films, pays reference to Moonraker by Dr. Evil's lair in space. The scene in which Drax is shot by the cyanide dart and ousted into space is parodied by Power's ejection of Dr. Evil's clone Mini-Me into outer space in the same way.
The Big Clock is a 1948 film noir thriller directed by John Farrow, based on the novel of the same name by Kenneth Fearing. The black-and-white film is set in New York City and stars Ray Milland and Maureen O'Sullivan, wife of the director and mother of Mia Farrow. Real-life married couple Elsa Lanchester and Charles Laughton appear in the film, as does Harry Morgan, in an early film role, as a hired thug.
The story is told in flashback. When it begins, George Stroud (Ray Milland) is shown hiding from the police behind the "big clock" ― the largest and most sophisticated one ever built, which dominates the lobby of the giant publishing company where he works.
Stroud, a crime magazine's crusading editor who is eager to spend more time with his wife (Maureen O'Sullivan), plans a long-postponed vacation from his job. Instead of meeting his wife at the train station, however, Stroud is preoccupied by an offer by his boss. He begins drinking and spends the evening out on the town with a glamorous blonde. She is later murdered and Stroud is assigned by his Hearst-like publishing boss Janoth (Charles Laughton) to find the killer.
While investigating, Stroud tries to keep the facts of his night with the woman a secret because witnesses could recognize him. As the investigation proceeds to its conclusion, Stroud must try to disrupt his ordinarily brilliant investigative team as they increasingly build evidence (albeit wrong) that he is the killer.
The Big Clock is a great movie, full of surprises and alot of fun to watch. Ray Milland and Charles Laughton are terrific together in this truly hidden film noir gem. The film is possibly a tad lighthearted to be considered genuine Noir. Nevertheless, the endless twists and turns and non-stop action will keep you entertained. Mix it all up with a wacky Elsa Lanchester and a sinister George Macready, and this film is easily worthy of four stars. Charles Laughton is as usal magnificent and Ray Milland has seldom been better.
The story was remade in 1987 as No Way Out with Kevin Costner and Gene Hackman. The 1948 version is more similar to the novel, with the 1987 remake updating the events to the American political world in Washington D.C. during the Cold War.
Witness for the Prosecution is a 1957 courtroom drama film based on a short story (and later play) by Agatha Christie dealing with the trial of a man accused of murder. This trial movie was the first film adaptation of the story, stars Tyrone Power, Marlene Dietrich, and Charles Laughton, and features Elsa Lanchester. The movie was adapted by Larry Marcus, Harry Kurnitz and the film's director Billy Wilder.
Witness for the Prosecution was nominated for Academy Awards for Best Actor in a Leading Role (Charles Laughton), Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Elsa Lanchester), Best Director, Best Film Editing, Best Picture, and Best Sound.
Sir Wilfred Robarts (Charles Laughton), a master barrister in ill health, takes Leonard Vole (Tyrone Power) on as a client, over the protestations of his private nurse, Miss Plimsoll (Elsa Lanchester), that the doctor had told him to stay away from criminal cases.
Vole is accused of murdering Mrs. French (Norma Varden), a rich, older woman who had become enamored of him, going so far as to make him the main beneficiary of her will. Strong circumstantial evidence all points to Vole as the killer.
When Sir Wilfred speaks with Vole's German wife Christine (Marlene Dietrich), he finds her rather cold and self-possessed, but she does provide an alibi. Therefore, he is greatly surprised when she is called as a witness for the prosecution. While a wife cannot testify against her husband, it is shown that Christine was in fact still married to another man when she wed Leonard. She testifies that Leonard admitted to her that he had killed Mrs. French, and that her conscience forced her to finally tell the truth.
During the trial (in the Old Bailey, carefully recreated by Alexandre Trauner), Sir Wilfred is contacted by a mysterious woman, who (for a fee) provides him with letters written by Christine to a mysterious lover named Max. This correspondence gives her such a strong motive to lie that the jury finds Leonard not guilty.
However, Sir Wilfred is troubled by the verdict. His instincts tell him that it was too tidy, too neat. And so it proves. By chance, he and Christine are left alone in the courtroom. She takes the opportunity to take credit for the whole thing. When she heard him say at the beginning that a wife's testimony would not be convincing, she decided to set it up so that hers would be for the prosecution and then be discredited. An ex-actress, she had played the part of the mystery woman so well that Sir Wilfred did not recognize her when he negotiated for the letters. She knew that Leonard was guilty; her testimony was the truth. Her letters are a fraud — Max never existed. When asked why she did it, she confesses that she loves Leonard.
Leonard appears and, now protected by double jeopardy, nonchalantly confirms what Christine had said. A young woman (Ruta Lee) then rushes into his arms. When he admits that they are going away together, Christine kills him with a knife in a fit of fury. Sir Wilfred remarks that Christine did not murder Leonard, but that she "executed him". Miss Plimsoll then cancels Sir Wilfred's holiday, realizing that he cannot resist taking charge of Christine's defense.
In my case, self-absorption is completely justified. I have never discovered any other subject quite so worthy of my attention.
(Waldo Lydecker - Laura 1944)
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