Hooray For Norman Lloyd!!!

Rating: 6/10 (14 June 2006)

In 1938 Orson Welles' Mercury Theater Group put on a classic stage production of Shakespeare's JULIUS CAESAR, in which Welles reset the story from the Roman Empire of 44 - 43 B.C. to 1938 Europe. Caesar was now a typical fascist dictator, and Brutus and his fellow conspirators were trying to free their country. The performances were well recalled, in particular two: George Coulouris as Mark Antony (played as a typical Fascist rabble rouser, as only Coulouris could do), and Norman Lloyd as a mediocre poet named Cinna. Cinna is a minor part in the play (it is not even seen in the classic film version of JULIUS CAESAR by Joseph Mankiewicz with Louis Calhern, Marlon Brando, John Guilgud, and James Mason). He is walking home shortly after the "Friends, Romans, Countrymen" speech, and the Roman citizenry is in a mindless anger at the conspirators. One of the conspirators is also named Cinna. When they confront the poet Cinna they jump to a fatally wrong conclusion. The way that Welles directed the scene, a nervous and frightened Lloyd is trying to get out of the confrontation...and quickly. As he has described it on television a year or so ago, the stage became deadly silent for a timed pause, and then the mob jumped him and frightened the audience by the stunning violence of it all.
It helped make the career of this multi-talented performer - he has been producer, director, and actor. He is best known to recent audiences as "Dr. Daniel Auschlander" on ST. ELSEWHERE on television. But his first movie role did not pop up until 1942. He played Frank Fry, the real saboteur in Alfred Hitchcock's SABOTEUR.
Hitchcock wanted to do SABOTEUR as a sequel (of sorts) to FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT, where he used Herbert Marshall as representative of suspect English pacifists (possibly "Cliveden" Set types) who were actually agents of Nazism. Being Hitchcock, he made sure that Marshall's character was actually dignified, proud of his real patriotism (even if misguided) to Germany, and eventually heroic to redeem himself for his daughter's sake. In his original plan for SABOTEUR he planned to make Harry Carey the villain - and a type of "American First" leader, like Charles Lindberg (see KEEPER OF THE FLAME). It was a smaller version of the debacle of trying to make Cary Grant a murderer and villain in SUSPICION the previous year: Hitch could not buck RKO and Grant's agent on that one, even though Grant was willing to try it, because of Grant's image. Here it was Carey's following as a popular, father-like, character actor and western star. So Hitch could not do what he really wanted to do.
Robert Cummings gave a decent performance but no more as the suspected saboteur who blew up a factory in the film. He criss-crosses the country trying to find the real saboteur (Lloyd), and running into many interesting "fifth columnist" types (like Clem Bevans, playing a particularly bitter old man who is helping the Axis). The head of the sabotage ring is wealthy Otto Kreuger, who gives a nice performance as a sophisticated villain. His first comment on meeting up with Cummings in his townhouse is to say it reminds him of the title of a novel. He pulls out of a bookcase THE DEATH OF A NOBODY by Jules Romain. Apparently he likes 20th Century French literature.
Cummings is hampered (at first) by Priscilla Lane, but she becomes an ally of his when she slowly realizes he was framed. Together they try to prove his innocence. They are fleeing the police and the enemy agents at the same time (with mixed results). We have seen this situation before. Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll had gone through the same thing chasing Godfrey Tearle in THE THIRTY-NINE STEPS, set in Great Britain. Unfortunately Donat and Carroll were better performers, and their script was better too.
But Lloyd is properly sinister. And he was to have as memorable a conclusion here as he had on stage in JULIUS CAESAR.
SPOILER COMING UP:
The conclusion of SABOTEUR was one of the best known in the films of Alfred Hitchcock. The Statue of Liberty is the setting when Cummings confronts Lloyd in the torch of the statue. Lloyd falls over the side, and Cummings tries to pull him up or hold until help comes. But the coat Lloyd wears starts ripping, and he falls shortly after clearing Cummings in the hearing of the police. It was a good sequence to conclude the film with. And it was a wonderful way for Lloyd to be introduced into movies.