The New Pictures

Phantom Lady (Universal) is the maiden production of Joan Harrison, who used to be Alfred Hitchcock's Girl Friday and who now becomes one of the few women producers in Hollywood's history.-Phantom Lady lags behind Hitchcock's best films, but it has picked up enough from them to sprint laps ahead of most thrillers.

The night when Architect Scott Henderson (Alan Curtis) meets her in a Manhattan bar and takes her to a show, the Lady (Fay Helm) is no phantom. Her handsome dolor is made the more memorable by a fiercely rhetorical hat. At the evening's end she drifts off without giving her name, and Architect Henderson drifts homeward to find detectives chewing cigars and chicle over his strangled wife. All efforts to find his alibi prove useless. The bartender (Andrew Tombes) has never seen her. Neither has the randy little drummer (Elisha Cook Jr.) who ogled her all evening. Neither has the Latin singer (Carmen Miranda's sister, Aurora), who threw a jealous tantrum because she and the Lady were wearing duplicate hats. Henderson is convicted of murder.

But his Secretary Carol (Ella Raines) realizes that somebody has stopped a lot of mouths with a lot of money. She hounds the nervous bartender. He is killed by a car. She starts pumping the drummer. He is strangled. Escorted by her boss's good friend, Jack Lombard (Franchot Tone), she even locates the maker of the special hat and its elusive wearer. But nothing really becomes clear to her until Good Friend Lombard tips his paranoiac hand.

Miss Harrison, with notable help from mood-wise Cameraman Elwood Bredell, invests this grade-B plot with a lot of style and scare. Some of the dialogue is ham, and toward the end the picture's edginess blunts noticeably. But the bar and bartender, the damp night streets, a late-night elevated platform, and a jam session that looks like an expressionistic death dance, have a good deal of Hitchcock's sinister melo-realistic melancholy.

My Sex. Asked in what respect she differs from other Hollywood producers, Joan Harrison, 34, tilts one blonde eyebrow, grins, and replies, "I use my sex.;' When, against Universal's better judgment, she became a Universal producer, the studio sent around a photographer to immortalize the event. "Well," snapped Miss Harrison, "do you want some leg art?" (see cut). Besides using a pair of ah-inspiring legs, she also uses a mind trained at the Sorbonne, at Oxford, and by England's shrewdest director.

Ten years ago, a friend roused her from a late morning hangover with the news that Alfred Hitchcock was advertising for a secretary. Hangover & all, Miss Harrison hurried 30 miles to London, bluffed her way past twelve applicants, and won out over 40 others whom Hitchcock had already interviewed.

As a secretary, Joan Harrison says she was terrible, but one important thing she did well. Hitchcock will never read a prospective script or even a synopsis for a script. It became Secretary Harrison's job to give him stories by word of mouth. Soon she began to improve on the originals as she went along. Miss Harrison became more & more useful to Hitchcock as an idea woman. With The Girl Was Young (1937) she did her first screen writing. With Jamaica Inn (1939) she did her first full script, got her first screen credit. By 1941 Secretary Harrison was 1) perhaps the most highly esteemed member of Hitchcock's permanent crew, 2) desperate. Her desperation was simple: she had ideas and an ego, and she was too close to a great man to do what she wanted with either. She left Hitchcock.

During the next two years several of Joan Harrison's scripts were ditched or manhandled by Paramount, Columbia, M.G.M., Warners. She was about ready to toss in the sponge when an agent turned up with a whodunit about a disappearing alibi in a conspicuous hat. Would she do a script? If so, Universalmight be induced to produce it. Miss Harrison saw possibilities in the novel, but two years' freelancing had made her intensely leary of the handling it might receive. So she told the high muckymucks of Universal exactly how the picture was to be made. Few men, far less a woman, far less a woman so neatly made, had ever talked to them like that. But if they were startled they were also impressed. If the lady knew their business so much better than they knew it themselves, how would she like to produce the picture? Miss Harrison said that nothing would give her greater pleasure.

Different Flavor. From the first Joan Harrison's working methods were rather unconventional: they showed foresight and sharp common sense. Miss Harrison lined up her art director (John Goodman) before she did anything else. Then she chose Scripter B. C. Schoenfeld, collaborated with him and, like Hitchcock gave him full screen credit. She also teamed closely with Director Robert Siodmak. She did her own casting, down to the most insignificant bit. She sank $60,000 of her budget in Franchot Tone for the maniac, on the theory that "unusual casting brings a different flavor to your pic ture." She persuaded Alan Curtis to play without makeup, on the equally startling theory that a hero looks more heroic if he looks like a human being. She talked Ella Raines into wearing the simple dresses and coiffures a secretary might reasonably wear. She was better aware than most Hollywoodians of the value of silence --a good half of Phantom Lady is without the doubtful benefit of either talk or music. She was also cagey in her handling of the baser emotions: in Phantom Lady the jam session is quite an orgy, por trayed metaphorically, without a line of dialogue, suggestive or otherwise.

Child Murderers. After she finished Phantom Lady three months ago, Producer Harrison was offered her choice of 1) a Western, 2) a stale-ale melodrama. She refused both: "I am a specialist. I am proud of being a specialist. I don't want to make pictures with the Andrews Sisters." Her current ideas are i) a film to be made entirely by women; 2) "a murder story involving only children."

Passage to Marseille (Warner). It is just before the fall of France. A freighter, bound from New Caledonia for Marseille, is captained by a brave and gentle Frenchman (Victor Francen). One of his passengers (Sydney Greenstreet) is a professional soldier and a Fascist. An air corps officer (Claude Rains) is blithely unconcerned when he realizes that five derelicts (Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, Philip Dorn, Helmut Dantine, George Tobias) whom the ship picks up are fugitives from Devil's Island. They have escaped in order to fight for France.

In flashbacks they tell Cinemactor Rains the story of their crimes, their sufferings, their escape. It makes for steamy jungle cinematography and theatrical but heartfelt political talk, which barely succeed in suggesting a fantastically heroic, patriotic allegory. Once the men are through talking, the Captain, in the film's best bit of acting, announces the French armistice. Then he secretly sets his course for England. The Fascists stage a mutiny and are defeated. The Fascist radio operator gives a Nazi bomber their position. The bomber's guns rake the decks murderously before Humphrey, Bogart, singlehanded, shoots it down. Cinemactor Bogart slaughters the surviving members of the bomber crew where they stand, afloat on the ruined wing, which is a powerful symbol for vanquished Germany. At the end, the ex-convicts are shown fighting and dying for their country.

There is a lot of ardent acting in Passage to Marseille, a fair amount of excitement, and a large, generous intention to show France, and Frenchmen, at their worst and best. But this important intention, even when it becomes articulate, struggles like a fly in molasses against the pseudo-solemn theatricality with which the film is conceived and executed.

*Some others, past & present: Mary Pickford, Fanchon Royer, Louella Parsons' daughter Harriet.

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