Review: Cage of Gold

 

Artist Jean Simmons is about to marry dull but thoroughly decent doctor James Donald, when her smoothie cad ex-boyfriend David Farrar (a former flyboy and current smuggler) comes waltzing back in her life. She finds herself unable to resist him and leaves a stable life with Donald for the clearly unscrupulous Farrar. Soon they are even married. Sadly for Simmons, once Farrar finds out that she’s a) pregnant, and b) doesn’t have quite as much money as he’d assumed, he drops her like a hot potato. The right utter bastard. Then out of the blue Simmons receives word that Farrar has died under mysterious circumstances. After a while, she has moved on and gotten back together with Donald, leaving the whole sordid mess behind her. And then Farrar turns up very well not dead and with an extortion plan in tow as he sets about making things very uncomfortable for Simmons. Madeleine Lebeau and Herbert Lom play a couple of Farrar’s underworld acquaintances, Bernard Lee turns up as a police inspector.

 

Decent performances (from occasionally rather surprising sources) are the highlight of this otherwise shoddy 1950 crime flick from director Basil Dearden (“Dead of Night”, “Khartoum”) and screenwriter Jack Whittingham (“Q Planes”, “Never Say Never Again”). David Farrar was positively stiff as a board in the otherwise gorgeous melodrama “Black Narcissus”, which was a model of its type. Here cast as an unscrupulous cad version of Cary Grant (with a touch of seedy Humphrey Bogart) Farrar is actually rather good. I didn’t know the bloke had it in him to be this thoroughly rotten and scheming. Everyone is pretty good in this one, especially sympathetic lead actress Jean Simmons in one of her better turns. She’s lovely, and so is French songbird Madeleine Lebeau. Herbert Lom is immediately perfect, so it’s a shame his role is a mere cameo that adds up to very little of importance. Bernard Lee turns up late in a stock role, but brings an innate decency and authority nonetheless. James Donald made a career out of playing boring but decent people and that’s exactly what he plays here, doing his usual rock-solid work.

 

It’s just that the film can’t help but get in its own way. The first half jarringly keeps jumping ahead in time. In a hurry, Basil and Jack? There’s also moments where the film seems to want to be “Casablanca”, with an African-American character named Sam, and Lom subbing for Peter Lorre.

 

The performances are all fine-to-good, but the storytelling is choppy and sloppy. Lousy stuff that wastes one heck of a good cast. They deserved better than they’re provided with here. Great B&W cinematography by Douglas Slocombe (“The Blue Max”, “Raiders of the Lost Ark”), but you just can’t quite latch on to anything here. A disappointment from the normally classy Ealing Studios.

 

Rating: C