The Great Flamarion
Tags: murder

Plot synopsis:
In a highly popular stage show sharp shooter Flamarion (Erich von Stroheim) keeps his audience enthralled with his keen abilities at target-shooting with a set of pistols in a high-profile display of talent. One of his assistants Connie Wallace (Mary Beth Hughes) dutifully plays the role of grateful actor as long as the money keeps coming in. The act is relatively secure except for Connies husband Al Wallace (Dan Duryea) who drinks a few too many some nights before going on stage. Connie and Al have a strained marriage partly from stress of show business but also because of Connies adulterous ways with other men, something that has eaten away at Als trust in her. Connie has tired of married life with Al and seduces the solitary and friendless Flamarion convincing him that he should make a mistake some night ridding her of Al so she and the great gun master can be together. After much soul searching Flamarion goes through with the plan eliminating Al, whereupon he and Connie make plans to meet and run away together. But Connie never shows up and Flamarion goes bankrupt on a drinking and gambling binge as he spends years searching the country for her, eventually finding and confronting her in a theater south of the border.THE GREAT FLAMARIONIn Mexico City in 1936 at a variety act theater, the show is interrupted by shots and screams during a clown act. The performers rush back stage, the crowd starts to panic and the clown Tony (Lester Allen) tries to convince the audience to keep their seats, as everything is under control. Meantime, a mysterious figure climbs a vertical ladder slowly, to the catwalk, as if wounded.The police arrives and start questioning, and find that a woman who was part of a bicycle act has been strangled. Her husband becomes the chief suspect and is taken away. Everyone has left except for Tony when the mysterious figure, badly wounded, slides onto the stage from above. Tony turns the man over, and recognizes him as The Great Flamarion (Erich von Stroheim), once the world's greatest sharp shooter. Flamarion begs Tony not to call for aid or police, but says he wants Tony to listen to why he killed the woman.From this point he film tells its story in flashback.Flamarion had a topdrawer variety act starring himself and his pistols. He used two assistants, former dancers Connie and Al Wallace (Mary Beth Hughes and Dan Duryea), a husband and wife. The act would begin with Connie and Al in evening dress canoodling at a table when Flamarion would knock. Al would hide, Connie would lift a glass of wine, and Flamarion, after entering in formal dress, would use his pistols to shatter the glass, light her match, shoot off a garter, use bullets to take off the tiny ornaments on her hair comb, and tear off the strap of her gown. Al would come out of hiding and weave back and forth among the light bulbs of a dressing table while Flamarion with split second timing would shoot out the bulbs, barely missing him at each shot.Flamarion himself was a stern, no-nonsense, arrogant, friendless, older man with a bull neck and a shaved head, bitter against women since his wife left him fifteen years earlier. Since then, Flamarion had lived only for his work. Connie, a great beauty, and Al seemed an outwardly happy couple. Connie had no problems with Flamarion as long as the money kept coming. On the other hand, Al had friction with Flamarion because he drank a few too many some nights before going on stage, and Flamarion was a perfectionist about their act, and did not tolerate anything that might lead to any mistakes, or in other words, someone getting shot.Connie and Al seemed happily married, but behind closed doors her ruthless ambition had turned him into an alcoholic and she was having an affair with Eddie (Stephen Barclay), a cyclist with the troupe. Al was jealous, but also a man of many weaknesses, particularly toward his wife."Connie," he tells her, "no matter what you do you're the only dame for me. You're a bad habit I can't cure, even if I wanted to. Any guy who wouldn't fall for you is either a sucker or he's dead."Al blamed her for his drinking, but he wouldn't divorce her. The marriage was strained also because of Connie's adulterous ways with other men, something that ate away at Al's trust in her.Connie had tired of married life because she couldn't take any more of Al's drunkenness, and decided to seduce the solitary and friendless Flammarion, convincing him that he should make a mistake some night, ridding her of Al so she and the great gun master could be together.Flamarion is a man of a certain age who had earlier sworn off women. He has no friends and practices ceaselessly with his pistols. It's not long before Connie breaks through Flamarion's reserve. When Connie professes her love for Flamarion and tells of her husband's abusive nature and hard drinking, Flamarion eventually opens his heart to this deceitful woman.Connie leads Flamarion to think she cares about him but her motive is to convince him to kill Al during a performance and make it look like an accident. Connie is careful never to suggest the murder directly, she just talks that she had a dream of it happening by pure accident. Flamarion is grim and impassive most of the time, but we also see his heart being torn apart by Connie, we see his smile of sheer happiness when he thinks she loves him. He also believes Connie when she says Al will never let her go. Flamarion has talks with Al, offering him money to get a new start in life somewhere else, but Al will not leave Connie.After much soul searching Flamarion decides to go through with the plan to eliminate Al. In his last moments before the show that will kill him, Al confesses his weaknesses to Eddie, who ends up lending him a fin, and he talks to Flamarion, who gives him 100 dollars. Just before the final act, Connie makes sure Al drinks an extra measure of whiskey. So, Flamarion makes an error in his stage act and Al has a bullet in his heart.The coroner rules the death an accident because Al was judged too drunk to perform properly and weaved incorrectly in what was otherwise a completely normal show. After the coroner's finding, Connie convinces Flamarion to wait three months before the two can show themselves together. Insisting they must lay low for a while, she tells him she will go back to Minnesota to be with her family. She agrees to meet Flamarion in exactly three months, in Chicago, at a specific hotel. Connie insists on no contacts, no phone calls, no letters, no gifts, but relents only to give Flamarion an address. Meantime, she makes actual plans to leave with Eddie on a tour south of the border, where she is sure the old man will not find her.Three months later, Flamarion shows up at the Chicago hotel, has the room filled with flowers, purchases gifts, and waits. Flamarion does a little dance in his eager anticipation to soon be with Connie. Connie never shows up. After waiting for days, Flamarion sends a telegram to the address Connie had given her in Minnesota, and eventually receives a response saying no such person lives at that address. Flamarion learns in a cruel way that Connie betrayed him.From then on we witness the downward trajectory of Flamarion as he realizes how he was used. He spends his money searching for Connie, first in Las Vegas, then in other cities. In Los Angeles, Flamarion asks his agent for information about where Connie might be. The agent tells Flamarion to forget about Connie, because he can get him booked right away and he would have an easy time getting a replacement. But Flamarion decides to continue looking, claiming he has no need for money. Flamarion goes bankrupt on a drinking and gambling binge as he spends years searching the country for her. He even sells his pistols, except for one. The only things he has in his pocket are a few dollars and a pistol. Finally, he gets a clue from Cleo (Esther Howard), a woman with a vaudeville act involving dogs, who tells him that in order to find Connie he needs to look for a bycicle act under the name of Eddie Wheeler.With this information Flamarion eventually traces both Connie and Eddie performing at the theatre in Mexico City. He sneaks into the theater, and, concealed behind props, witnesses Connie having first a tryist with yet another man, and an altercation with Eddie.After others are out of the way, Flamarion enters Connie's dressing room, and upbraids her for her duplicity. At first Connie pretends she still loves him, that others forced to do what she did, but Flamarion will have none of it. Once convinced that she is not going to be believed, she shames Flamarion by claiming he has never been loved, and she put up with his disgusting self just to use him to get rid of her husband. As she senses that Flamarion is about to choke her to death, she manages to grab his pistol. She is able to shoot him only after he has started to strangle her, but he keeps enough strength to finish the job. Bleeding from the shot, he crawls away to die.Policemen arrive back at the scene just as Flamarion dies after speaking his last words to Tony.

Review: Von Stroheim mavens should appreciate the movie, though, as should devotees of Dan Duryea, who plays a hard-drinking, done-wrong hoofer..
Film Noir Gem with great performances from von Stroheim, Hughes, and Duryea.
"The Great Flamarion" is an undiscovered little gem of a film from Rebublic that features von Stroheim as the title character, a cold and arrogant vaudeville performer who specializes in sharp shooting.
When Connie professes her love for Flamarion and tells of her husband's abusive nature and hard-drinking, Flamarion eventually opens his heart to this femme-fatale, played to the hilt by Mary Beth Hughes, a most underrated actress, who toys with men in the tradition of film noir greats such as Joan Bennett in "Scarlet Street," Jane Greer in "Out of The Past," and Yvonne DeCarlo in "Criss Cross." When Connie suggests that Flamarion accidentally hit Al, portrayed by the always terrific Dan Duryea, during their gun skit, Flamarion's life changes forever.
Directed by the great Anthony Mann, starring the even greater Erich von Stroheim, and including a strong supporting role for a memorable Dan Duryea, The Great Flamarion is a cult film waiting to happen.
Only in France apparently can there be found a decent edition, as over there they presumably know a good thing when they see it.Anthony Mann's career started in B-movies, where he quickly made a mark for himself with some superlative film noirs such as T-Men (1947), and Border Incident (1949), projects frequently characterised by striking monochrome cinematography as well as taut and assured direction.
Appearing a couple of years before this first great period in his output, The Great Flamarion anticipates some of the highlights of the films to follow, as it includes some especially noteworthy scenes with chiaroscuro and expressionistic lighting effects, as well as exhibiting what once critic has identified as a consistent theme of this director: that of a hero haunted by past trauma.
In the case of The Great Flamarion it's the turn of the eponymous, dying, theatrical sharpshooter, played initially as a martinet by Erich von Stroheim: a man driven by his most recent betrayal as well as haunted by a doomed romance of some years before.Von Stroheim's career as a great silent director arguably reached a pinnacle with Greed (1924) before crash-diving through allegations of budgetary extravagance, orgies on set, as well as his own professional disdain for the front office.
After Queen Kelly (1929) he never really directed again, instead existing as a character actor or technical adviser in the films of lesser men, his charisma and abilities on screen occasionally granting real star status in such classics as La Grande Illusion (1937).
His presence as Flamarion is a masterstroke, as the weight the actor brings to the role, and the sad decline of the proud, arrogant shooting master he portrays is inevitably complemented by the real life pathos of a giant of cinema, reduced Welles-like, to B-movie parts in order to keep the wolf from the door.
(A similar feeling attends another, ultimately pathetic, variety turn also essayed by Stroheim: the ventriloquist The Great Gabbo, 1929.) Not that Mann's film is at the poverty row level of inspiration of such other vehicles for the actor as The Lady And The Monster, made two years before.
I'm not a genius, I'm a worker." Von Stroheim apparently took a particular dislike to the flashback structure of Mann's work, perhaps not surprisingly for a silent director famed in his heyday for his realism, thinking that it was crafted to make the film seem 'more important' than it was.
Whether or not this is true, the device is typical of film noir a genre to which The Great Flamarion is closely related, through its portrayal of doomed and cheated character types, a splendid femme fatale in the form of Connie Wallace (Beth Hughes) as well as the presence of the archetypal noir fall-guy-come-villain, Dan Duryea.
As Von Stroheim's alcoholic stage stooge Al Wallace, Duryea is perfectly cast, jealous of his own wife, alternating between self-loathing and marital depression as he cadges his next drink from friends and boss.
As in his later noir work, Mann shows his skill in drawing out the perilous moments before violence, a process heightened in one scene here by having the unknowing Wallace act out the part of target on stage in a parody both of real peril and an unfaithful wife caught with her lover.Of course The Great Flamarion is not so great in all respects; the cuckold-revenge plot is hardly original, and the dialogue in some scenes has been criticised.
Arguably, Mann would not make a really psychologically acute drama until the start of his great series of westerns with James Stewart in Winchester '73, five years later - also co-starring Duryea - taking advantage of the bigger budget and an altogether better script.
"The Great Flamarion" has an interesting setting and a good cast that give life to an otherwise routine story of love, deceit, and revenge.
The rest of the film moves much more slowly, and does not match the first part, but it is pretty good.The main performers are quite good - Erich von Stroheim as a magician fanatically devoted to his act, Mary Beth Hughes as his manipulative assistant, and Dan Duryea as Hughes's drunken husband.
The Great Flamarion is directed by Anthony Mann and collectively written by Anne Wigton, Heinz Herald, Richard Weil and Vicki Baum.
It stars Erich von Stroheim, Mary Beth Hughes, Dan Duryea, Stephen Barclay, Lester Allen and Esther Howard.
Soon he falls to the ground, and cradled by one of the stage employees, he tells a story of lust, deceit, murder and broken hearts...Though it falls into a familiar subset of film noir that encompasses the obsessive dupe, reference Criss Cross, The Killers, Scarlet Street et al, Anthony Mann's film has a most interesting structure.
Story is essentially told from the mouth of a dying man, his guilt set in stone, we spin to flashbacks and narration as The Great Flamarion (Stroheim) himself clues us in to the dangers of not following your brain, but what's in your underwear.Flamarion, wonderfully essayed by the acid faced Stroheim, is a sharp-shooter on the vaudeville circuit.
His two assistants are husband and wife team Connie (Hughes) and Al (Duryea) Wallace, he's a drunk and she's out for what she can get, and what she wants at this moment in time spells trouble for Flamarion and Al. So begins a treacherous tale as a once wise and closed off man falls hook, line and sinker for a pair of shapely legs young enough to be propping up his daughter.Connie Wallace (Hughes excellent) is one of the classic femme fatales, she's not just duping one man, not even two, her capacities for feathering her own nest are enormous.
Watching her break down Flamarion's walls is pitch black stuff, as is Flamarion's pitiful descent into becoming a broken man, while Duryea's (another in his long line of great film noir losers) Al roams the edges of the frame as a pitiful drunk stumbling towards doom.
It's not front line Mann or as good as Scarlet Street (released after The Great Flamarion), but it is a little noir gem.
Von Stroheim plays Flamarion, a trick shot artist, who is in great demand.
A mild-mannered, melancholic and essentially decent man(Erich Von Stroheim) working as vaudeville star becomes romantically involved in a destructive affair with a predatory woman( the femme fatal Mary Beth Hughes).He falls fatally in love with his scheming and heartless assistant who's unhappy married to a drunk(Dan Duryea).
Erich Von Stroheim makes an absolutely hypnotic acting as upright man subtly destroyed by a bad woman.The smouldering predatory Mary Beth Hughes as manipulating assistant who destroys them all around and Dan Duryea as alcoholic husband winning get another awesome acting.
(If I had seen this in the cinema, I would have looked to see if she had picked my pocket during the screening.) Poor von Stroheim, fifteen years without touching a woman and suddenly Mary Beth vamps him.
Dan Duryea, who plays her alcoholic husband, has less acting to do than usual, partly because he is meant to be a victim this time instead of a heavy, and victims can coast in the movies, whereas villains have to work at it more.
Von Stroheim plays a super-marksman whose stage act consists of shooting cigarettes out of people's mouths, etc.
Or so the von Stroheim character begins his flashback narration.This movie has never quite worked for me.
And he was a fine actor in "Grand Illusion" and an interesting character actor in "Sunset Boulevard." Dan Duryea was good at playing heals.
Part of this was due to Von Stroheim's acting, but it also was fortunate that he was paired with a young but very talented director (Anthony Mann).
Because of his success with films like THE GREAT FLAMARION, Mann went on to direct many wonderful films and Von Stroheim had a mild resurgence in his prospects.The film begins with a murder at a theater in Mexico.
Since you know that the murder occurred, there isn't a lot of suspense about the whole thing, but the film did a wonderful job of making the viewer actually care about him and understand why he felt compelled to kill this particular woman.
The sweet and lovely Connie, you learn, is one horrible lady and her character is exceptionally interesting and gritty--sort of like an evil Noir femme fatale.
Little Republic studio must have been a come-down for the great European impresario Erich von Stroheim.
That is until trollopy assistant Mary Beth Hughes decides to rid herself of dipso husband Dan Duryea.
The Great Flamarion is so slow -- it's 78 minutes felt like 2 hrs.The script was poor, the dialog flat, the plot predictable and the ending telegraphed from the first scene.I guess everybody else was wowed by the big name director (Anthony Mann) and the big name director turned actor (Erich Von Stroheim) and the sort of big name producer (William Wilder - brother of Billy Wilder).
Although Erich Von Stroheim is top billed in The Great Flamarion this film really belongs to Mary Beth Hughes who was the model for playing two timing dames that others took as the standard.
Hughes and her alcoholic husband Dan Duryea, a former dance act work as Von Stroheim's stooges in the act with him throwing carefully timed shots.
In fact there's a lot of resemblance between The Great Flamarion and the Billy Wilder classic.Von Stroheim is a pitiable character in the end, his fall and degradation is like a Greek tragedy.
Anthony Mann directs Erich von Stroheim.
There were clashes between them during the shooting, and Mann was wise enough to duck: it's definitely von Stroheim's film, as he succeeds in realizing his perhaps most poignant and shattering film character.
The story of the perfect shot is Vicki Baum's, and the story as unfolded by Anthony Mann is shattering and in a way a parallel to Josef von Sternberg's "The Blue Angel", describing the same kind of long great fall from established greatness to pitiable misery by delusive love.
Erich von Stroheim is the Great Flamarion, a sharp-shooter stage act who uses real bullets in his set pieces that also involves husband and wife team Dan Duryea (Al) and Mary Beth Hughes (Connie).
Far from a bad movie the movie suffers from the fact that we know the ending (Erich Von Stroheim is telling what happened as he lays dying).
Even if we had seen this from the beginning we'd know it ends bad but we wouldn't be able to work out several of the twists that knowing the end imparts.If there is any real flaw beyond knowing how it ends, its the casting of Von Stroheim who seems too old and a bit too stiff for his man led astray.
If you love Erich von Stroheim and Dan Duryea, this early film by Anthony Mann is for you.
Duryea and von Stroheim are both great at all the little things that come between the words and the dialogue is good, too, not surprising as one of the screenwriters, Heinz Herald, won an Oscar for "Dr. Erlich's magic bullet" and was nominated for "The Life of Emile Zola".
Erich Von Stroheim,(The Great Flamarion),"Napoleon",'55, plays a sharpshooter or a type of William Tell, who can shoot a cigarette right out of your mouth.
Flamarion could also shoot the straps off a dress that Mary Beth Hughes,(Connie Wallace),"Close to My Heart",'51 was wearing in their act they performed on the stage.
This is a very serious crime drama in-spite of it being centered around the vaudeville circuit and 4 of it's members: Flamarion, Connie, Al, and Eddie.Definitely a recommended film.9/10.
Made By Anthony Mann,whose westerns are classics ,this is an interesting ,if very derivative ,thriller.A gorgeous woman (Mary Beth Hughes)uses Stroheim to get rid of her alcoholic hubby to get her hands on Eddie ....and probably other men.Watch it for Stroheim:this gentleman who once claimed he was Empress one of Elizabeth of Austria's ladies in waiting's son is always fascinating..
He doesn't disappoint in this story of love, betrayal and murder that is set among the vaudeville circuit of those years.We are introduced to the Great Flamirion, a man who is a sharp shooter, as he performs his act with the assistance of the Wallaces, a couple that move around the stage, as he shoots at different objects Connie and Al are holding.
But as fate would have it, Flamirion finds her.Erich Von Stroheim, a distinguished director himself, plays Flamarion with panache.
Robinson made a similarly—themed flick around the same time as THE GREAT FLAMARION, and a comparison of the two leading performances would be telling (Duryea was in that movie, too).
As a meditation on the psychological predetermination of the human in general, Mann's movie is not without its merits.Quite well written, intensely misogynistic, directed by Mann, played by Stroheim, Duryea and Mrs. Hughes, the story of Flamarion is an intensely interesting and very watchable, endearing and bitter drama about a loner's vulnerability.
It is Duryea who makes an impressive role here.Mrs. Hughes has, at times, a lousy diction.The title of the movie, and the name of the leading character, are wonderfully chosen.
The film's a poverty row knock-off of Scarlet Street, but it's not bad and has an interesting performance by Erich Von Stroheim.
The Great Flamarion might be a poverty row knock-off of Scarlet Street, but it has much to offer to those fond of noirs and who like effective performances from unexpected sources.
We learn that the man was The Great Flamarion (Erich Von Stroheim), an expert marksman, and this is his story...of a man brought low by his love of a heartless woman.
Erich Von Stroheim is the heart of the movie and he pulls it off.
In The Great Flamarion, Von Stroheim has to show us a man who has improbably fallen in love and feels the joy of something he never expected.
This is an overlooked film noir cleverly directed by Anthony Mann.
The Great Flamarion (Erich Von Stroheim) is an egotistical vaudeville performer that relies on his skills as an expert marksman.
His trick gun-shot act requires two assistants, Connie (Mary Beth Hayes) and Al Wallace (Dan Duryea), who must rehearse tirelessly to have every movement in the act perfect.
Connie becomes bored with her alcoholic husband and begins flirting with her hard nosed, no nonsense boss.Stroheim is stoic, solemn and unemotional and fits the bill as the Great Flamarion.
The character played by Mary Beth Hughes has to be one of the biggest tramps in a classic movie, leading on at least two men as far as the audience knows while her husband (Dan Duryea) remains unapologetically drunk.
Not only is there the handsome and noble Stephen Barclay, but moody specialty performer Erich von Stroheim who utilizes both Hughes and Duryea in his gun act.
Duryea, one of the great sleazy guys of film noir, is just pathetic here, but as an actor, simply delightful.
But thus is von Stroheim's film all the way, directed in a unique style by film noir and dark western veteran Anthony Mann..
In this case, "The Great Flamarion" was a trick shot artist, portrayed by German actor Eric Von Stroheim.
But that's getting way ahead of the story.I never really got the impression that Connie Wallace (Mary Beth Hughes) loved Flamo, he with the Nazi like exterior and the vein popping out of his head.
When it looked like she was getting ready to ditch alcoholic husband Al (Dan Duryea), the story started to come together with a bit more sense.
He didn't have a lot of flair but he did put Anthony Mann on the ladder to directorial fame and he also used a couple of great actors in Erich Von Stroheim and Dan Duryea.
The film had a European flavour (it was adapted from a Vicki Baum story "The Big Shot") and Stroheim was perfect as an obsessed vaudevillian - a role he had perfected in "The Great Gabbo" (1929).
He drew viewer's attention in every scene he appeared.A shot is heard throughout a Mexico City music hall - when a man falls from the rafters, Tony an old trouper, recognises Flamarion (Erich Von Stroheim), once the world's greatest sharp shooter.
Dying, Flamarion tells his story:- Flamarion lived only for his work until he fell in love with Connie (Mary Beth Hughes), who with her husband Al (Dan Duryea) form Flamarion's shooting act.
Connie leads Flamarion to think she cares about him but her motive is to convince him to kill Al during a performance and make it look like an accident.
To me, the best scene in the film is where Von Stroheim does a little dance in his eager anticipation to soon be with Connie.He sets out to find her and eventually traces both Connie and Eddie performing at a cheap theatre in Mexico City.