tempest in a portuguese teacup

[Storm Over Lisbon played in the Roxie Theater‘s film noir festival “I Wake Up Dreaming: The French Have a Name for It.”  It played in a double bill with Shadow of Terror (1945).]

Storm Over Lisbon (1944, USA, George Sherman) is often billed as Poverty Row’s remake of Casablanca, and it’s an apt characterization.  This time around the wide array of desperate individuals attempting to procure papers to escape World War are stranded in neutral Portugal, but if the iconic Curtiz film was indeed the original point of reference, its tendency is towards the film’s melodramatic impulses rather than the Epstein Brothers’s elegant wit.  Eric von Stroheim imperiously presides over a labyrinthine Art Deco-ish hotel/nightclub that also covertly functions as a broker house for international war secrets and negotiations, setting the stage the criss-crossing fates of such “colorful” eccentrics such as Richard Arlen, Robert Livingston, Otto Kruger, and, most memorably,
the film’s spectacularly awkward leading lady, former champion ice skater Vera Hruba Ralston.  Her ice queen character is supposed to be one of the best dancers in Europe,  which is supposed to justify a lengthy nightclub dance sequence where she performs a routine featuring bizarrely spastic Orientalism-meets-Martha-Graham choreography, and as it goes on and on and on–it must have been some ten minutes or so–it starts to become rather entrancing in its surrealistic awfulness (when the routine threatens to occur yet again at the end of the film the entire theater simultaneously erupted in laughter, the most inadvertently memorable moment of the screening).

The film’s chief attribute, as the Roxie’s series proved again and again, is John Alton’s characteristically lovely and expressive black and white photography, and it is Alton’s noir credentials that merited its inclusion in this festival at all–otherwise there’s hardly a noir-ish thing about it.  Also of note is the striking set, which is very shrewdly utilized–the chaotic plots entanglements involving an overwhelmingly dense array of minor characters creates a series of complex spacial arrangements that brought to mind the (vastly superior, of course) La Règle de jeu, with its constantly shifting planes of physical and social interaction in cavernous hallways and on staircases; Storm also includes a hidden elevator, which is strikingly utilized at several key moments of the film. But in the end it unfortunately doesn’t amount to a whole lot–the actors playing the “good guys” aren’t nearly good enough to compensate for thinly written characters, and it’s impossible not to react to the big reveal and send-off at the end with more than an indifferent shrug.  “Merely a tempest in a teacup” the The New York Times‘s anonymous reviewer claimed at the time of its release, and that about sums everything up, even if it quite fails to convey the minor pleasures the film offers along the way.