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Suspense:                         

                Pros: A taut, atmospheric, suspenseful thriller. Lorre, Greenstreet, Zachary Scott's debut. A splendid supporting cast. The efficacy of this little film, and the Eric Ambler novel on which it was based, has emerged stunningly apparent again, in what begins to look like a manipulated return to the Cold War on the borders of Russia and Georgia. As if the Bush/Cheney regime were not responsible for enough messes over the last eight years, the process which has produced them for nearly 150 years continues. It's called: Back to Square One.

Cons: This copy of THE MASK OF DIMITRIOS, the only one generally available at the time my review was published, is not so complete and sharp as it should be.

The Bottom Line: THE MASK OF DIMITRIOS, a minor sleeper based on Eric Ambler's seminal spy novel, is one of the first influential, artistically truthful Hollywood sound films on the machinations of Geopolitics.

***** 

The term conspiracy means bluntly, "people breathing together." That definition means most of us, from millennia past until the very moment you read these words, have been part of a conspiracy. Probably, without quite knowing it, we are part of one now.

At a given moment, innocent enough, hundreds of millions of small conspiracies exist, but among them are a few million of the criminal variety. These latter have always been carried on in secret, hidden behind warnings like Death to Squealers! Defense of the Empire! State Secret! National Security! Presidential Privilege! In other words, as part of projects that, without open "due process," these conspiracies deprive people of their reputations, their wealth, their property, their health, their lives --  planned and executed by individuals breathing together behind masks. Often in the guise of "protection" or "preserving our way of life."

Such groups of individuals are, as a matter of course, in oligarchies, autocracies and dictatorships; deadly to the rule of Just Law or pretensions of democracy; hence, the fascinating mordant joy and meaning of Jean Negulesco's 1944 thriller, THE MASK OF DIMITRIOS.

It is still an exciting movie, after over 50 years, one which plumbs the convoluted activities of the operational groups that prepared the ground for World War II.

Based on Eric Ambler's novel, A Coffin for Dimitrios, this little sleeper begins in 1938, on a shaley beach along the Bosporus Straits, near Istanbul. A couple of fishermen have come on the bloated body of a man. We then shift to an expatriate party where Cornelius Latimer Leyden (Lorre), a Dutch crime and spy story writer, is the guest of honor. Leyden, taking a break after completing a recent novel, is introduced by Madame Chavez (Florence Bates) to cueball-headed Colonel Haki (Kurt Katch) of the Turkish Secret Police. Haki has come expressly to meet him. He is an admirer of Leyden's creations, but suggests that they are often too neat. He wonders if Leyden is interested in "real murders."

For instance, he says, stroking his thin mustache, take this dossier handed to him as he was about to leave for the party:

The dossier reveals that the criminal Dimitrios Makropolos, alias Talat, alias Talidis, between the Wars, was a mid-level entrepreneur in the business of what we would call now money laundering, smuggling, thieving, blackmail, espionage, assassination. Along the way, (carefully couched in this Hayes Office approved Warner Brothers film), he was also a charmer, womanizer, pimp, a drug dealer and a consummate double-crosser.

Haki tells Leyden of how Dimitrios began as a Greek figpacker, and that at one or another time in the 20 years police agencies pursued him, he was protected by his own wits, and by very powerful forces. (In the United States today, we might call Dimitrios "an operative" or a "shadowy power broker.") Dimitrios was never fingerprinted or photographed. Or if he was, the records somehow disappeared, were destroyed, or could not be produced at a needed moment.

His body, thoroughly soaked in the waters of the Black Sea, identified by documents in his clothing, has just been discovered. Would Leyden care to accompany Colonel Haki to view the body?

This is the real thing, mutters Leyden. Of course, he would.

Thus, Cornelius Leyden begins a quest to discover who Dimitrios Makropolos really was and what exactly he did. It might, Leyden reasons, make a wonderful spy novel.

Having seen the corpse of Dimitrios, using the dossier as his guide,  Leyden entrains for Smyrna (now Izmir), a principal Turkish port on the Mediterranean. It was there, in 1922, during a period of martial law, that the lowly figpacker offered a poor Muslim named Abdul (Monte Blue) to share the proceeds from robbing a money changer. The crime went bad, the money changer was stabbed to death. Dimitrios fingered Abdul, and then escaped to Athens with all the currency. It was the seed money for his later activities.

The camera follows Leyden after Dimitrios, incorporating flashbacks from the dossier, the research of journalists he knows, interviews with eye witnesses, memories of lovers and acquaintances. On the Orient Express to Athens, Leyden is intercepted by a Mr. Peters (Sidney Greenstreet), aka Caille, who has also been seeking Dimitrios, hoping to recover a large sum of money. Peters throws in with the reluctant Leyden, offering to share the loot, if it still exists.

Leyden pauses in Sophia, capital of Bulgaria, to consult Marukakis (Eduardo Ciannelli), a newspaper man, who is able to give him more information and introduce him to Irana Preveza (Fay Emerson), a Greek-born Bulgarian, former mistress of a director in the powerful Eurasian Credit Trust, and a lover of Dimitrios. Now running a "night club," she tells of how Dimitrios, in 1923, was involved in the attempted assassination of the Bulgarian Prime Minister Stambulisky, how he took her love and her money. Upon hearing from Leyden of Dimitrios' death, she continues how he blackmailed her "husband," the director of the Eurasian Credit Trust (a trans-European "Citibank" for the Balkans and Central Asia), and how Dimitrios then elicited his protection.

The search takes Leyden from Athens and Sofia to Belgrade, Geneva, and at last to Paris. It is in Geneva, in an interview with the wealthy retired spy master, Wladislaw Grodek (Victor Francen), that he learns how Dimitrios, in Grodek's employ during 1926, met a clerk named Karol Bulic (Steven Geray) in the Serbian Defense Ministry in Belgrade, how he charmed Bulic's wife with glimpses of the high life and tricked Bulic himself into amassing gambling debts. Dimitrios blackmailed the clerk into stealing important military plans, with disastrous consequences for everyone involved, including the immediate individuals, national governments and whole populations, except of course . . . Dimitrios. Grodek ends the story by pointing out that Dimitrios double crossed him, too, smuggled the plans out of Serbia, and sold them to another (higher) bidder.

According to Grodek, there is only one witness left -- in Paris -- where it is suggested Dimitrios last lived, in comfort during the 1930's, supported by smuggling of other kinds. At this climactic point, Mr. Peters raises the ante.

THE MASK OF DIMITRIOS marshals an impressive array of talent and skill for its sly and modest meditation on some of the origins of World War II. Ambler, who wrote A Coffin for Dimitrios (now published under the much better but ironically similar title for the Movie), was among the first, and certainly the best of the pre-War spy novelists, a literary godfather to Graham Greene, Frederick Forsythe, and John LeCarre.

Jean Negulesco, a veteran of two dozen musical shorts and the like, got his first real chance to direct an important film here. He went on to guide such acclaimed movies as JOHNNY BELINDA (1946), and ROAD HOUSE (also 1946), as well as such other edgy little pictures like THREE STRANGERS (1946) and UNDER MY SKIN (1950) -- before subsiding into safer, more profitable material during the McCarthy period: HOW TO MARRY A MILLIONAIRE (1953) and THREE COINS IN THE FOUNTAIN (1954), etc. [He continued to make commercial vehicles until his retirement in 1970.]

The cinematographer is the superb artist in black and white, Arthur Edeson, who shot THE MALTESE FALCON (1941) and CASABLANCA (1942). The music is by Adolph Deutch, who did the music also for THE MALTESE FALCON.

In fact, all these foreign born artists may have brought a European sensibility to the material.

The rare presence of the cadaverous Austrian Peter Lorre (replacing Ambler's English anti-hero) as an almost romantic lead indicates how European and unique the project was. And the Englishman Sidney Greenstreet's Mr. Peters continues a partnership with Lorre, begun in THE MALTESE FALCON, which extended over eight films. The rest of the supporting cast, also mostly European, largely refugees, add to an enfolding impression of place. The watchfully intelligent Belgian actor, Victor Francen, for instance, makes an impressive spy master, and the Hungarian Steven Geray is most affecting as Bulic, the file clerk, who loves his wife too much. Others, such as Katch, Ciannelli, Marjorie Hoshele, George Tobias, John Abbott, Florence Bates and George Metaxa are solidly helpful.

The title lead, of course, is Zachary Scott, in his film debut as the wily Dimitrios Makropolos. Scott has everything in this picture. He is handsome, charismatic, understandable evil incarnate, and a first class actor. He went on in 1946 to play Monte Baragon, a real rotter, adding a great deal to MILDRED PIERCE for Michael Curtiz. Unfortunately, Hollywood never saw his range as an actor, but only as a villain, and despite his sympathetic share cropper in Jean Renoir's superb independent film, THE SOUTHERNER (1945), he was type-cast, until a serious car accident curtailed his career as a leading man.

It should also be noted that Irana Preveza is one of the first few good roles that the gorgeous Faye Emerson (HOTEL BERLIN, 1945; NOBODY LIVES FOREVER, 1946) ever got in feature movies. One can imagine that she might have taken off in this role, as Marilyn Monroe did from Huston's THE ASPHALT JUNGLE (1950). She married FDR's son, Elliot, about this time, however, and her movie career never prospered, although she did make a considerable impression as an early day TV Hostess of  the 1950's.

In summing up THE MASK OF DIMITRIOS, what I said about the novel might well be applied to the film:

"A COFFIN FOR DIMITRIOS is not only a spy novel but an imaginative history of the crucial years between the First World War and the Rise of Hitler, when, much like today, Britain, France, The United States and other powers scrambled for cash and power while the situation in Eastern Europe. Russia, the Balkans, the Mediterranean, the Middle and Far East deteriorated, making World War II inevitable. It is also a wonderful study of a "well educated" fool, like a majority of Americans today, preoccupied with his own small concerns, who does not, never does really, recognize the difference between fantasy and reality."

In the area of fantasy and speculation, Phillip French, in his July 19, 1999, Guardian review of THE THIRD MAN restoration, makes an apt observation that Carol Reed's renowned study of a pulp fiction writer Holly Martin's search, in Post-War Austria, for the International criminal Harry Lime is really based on Ambler's (and Negulesco') THE MASK OF DIMITRIOS. [Graham Greene, in a departure from his normal practice, wrote his novel The Third Man after he wrote his screenplay for the movie.] The supposition is reinforced, when we remember that Joseph Cotton (Martins) and Orson Welles (Lime), who took a creative hand in THE THIRD MAN, had written their own adaptation of Ambler's next novel, Journey into Fear (1940). For the 1942 Mercury Theater film, JOURNEY INTO FEAR, Welles played Colonel Haki, the same Turkish secret police officer who figures in THE MASK OF DIMITRIOS.

[Looking at the episodic, non-linear time structure and journalist "hero" of Ambler's 1939 A Coffin for Dimitrios, it might not be so wild a speculation that this novel may have been a distant influence on *CITIZEN KANE (1941). That possibility is pressed home if we examine Welles' *MR. ARKADIN (1955), which combines the two plots.]

And finally, it is Colonel Haki of the Turkish Secret Police, in THE MASK OF DIMITRIOS, who to Cornelius Leyden explains the mechanism of Assassination -- you may wish to substitute politics, economics, media hype, modern social engineering, 9-1-1, "The War on Terrorism," or the (projected) attack on Iraq, (and let's use the complete speech from Ambler's novel): "My dear friend, Dimitrios would have nothing to do with the actual shooting. No! His kind never risk their skins like that. They stay on the fringe of the plot. They are the professionals, the entrepreneurs, the links between the businessmen, the politicians who desire the end but are afraid of the means, and the fanatics, the idealists who are prepared to die for their convictions. The important thing to know about an assassination is not who fired the shot, but who paid for the bullet."

No more succinct explanation of how our Modern World is manipulated has ever been written.

Saddam Hussein began as a thug very like Dimitrios before he moved on to assassination under the bright lights of Baghdad. Before he became our current nemesis, he did our bidding against Iran, until he was no longer useful. In that regard he joined a long list, including Trujillo, Batista, Pinochet, Noriega, Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar . . . . In the next few months, if we are lucky, we shall learn of an American Dimitrios or two who, in our name, have been involved in efforts "to save The New World Order" . . . but of course, by that time, the damage will probably have been done.

Meanwhile, enjoy (hopefully in the new restored version) Peter Lorre, Sidney Greenstreet and Zachary Scott in this thoroughly engrossing little International spy thriller, THE MASK OF DIMITRIOS.

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[Editorial Note for the Red Room Edition: The covert and fascistic acts of the Bush Administration have made THE MASK OF DIMITRIOS ever more relevant than it was when this review was published in 2002. The hopeful Bush/Cheney behind the scenes Foreign Policy group has evidently split into two camps. The Project for a New American Century Leadership, quietly guided by ex-felon Eliot Abrams, continures to push for war with Iran and/or Syria. The Foreign Policy Advisors who have served past Presidents, people like Brent Sculcroft and Henry Kissinger, with Jimmy Carter's old National Security Advisor Zyban Bryzinski in charge, the Geopoliticians, have turned to provoking Russia into an imperialistic revival of the Cold War. After all, following all our idealistic rhetoric about stopping Soviet aggression, and removing the Red Yoke from the neck of little countries like Afghanistan, it must stick in the craw of the Kremlin that when we wanted some additional future oil reserves, the United States simply invaded Iraq on a false pretext. A future review/article will explore the origins of the compromise which brought about the Russia/Georgia border war in the last couple of weeks.

*****

The Novel: A Coffin for Dimitrios by Eric Ambler --

http://www.epinions.com/book-review-34B3-7258138-39FF534B-prod1

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*CITIZEN KANE --

http://www.epinions.com/mvie-review-4874-81FD18C-38741497-bd4

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MR. ARKADIN --

http://www.epinions.com/mvie-review-7A18-458AFFD2-3A4C153E-prod3