A
woman walks out of the rain and into a university concert hall where a cellist
is just finishing a performance. The students swarm around him to proclaim his
greatness, but then he and the woman lock eyes. They are long lost lovers,
separated by the war, each assuming the other was dead. The cellist is Karel
Novak (Paul Henreid) and the woman is a pianist named Christine Radcliffe (Bette
Davis). They embrace and go back to her place to plan their wedding and start
their lives over again. Everything’s going great until Karel notices that
Christine has a nice place. A curiously nice place. Where, he wonders, does she
get the money to afford such a swank apartment with such an impressive view of
the New York skyline?
Christine
tells Karel that she gives piano lessons to rich pupils who reward her
lavishly. Karel doesn’t believe that, but he tries to make himself believe it,
at least until a massively successful and world-famous composer named Alexander
Hollenius (Claude Rains) busts into their wedding reception in a jealous fury.
DECEPTION
is a noir melodrama as opposed to a noir crime film. There are no gangsters or
bank heists, no femme fatales or hardboiled detectives. This is a love
triangle, with two men in love with same woman. One man is good (though capable
of jealous rages) while the other man is a possessive, egotistical psychopath.
The woman, it must be said, is a liar, albeit a bad one. She tries her best to
juggle these two guys, along with the several different stories about her true
relationship to each one of them, until everything comes crashing down.
While
DECEPTION is no masterpiece, it is a perfectly good star vehicle for Bette
Davis. This is the kind of film that demonstrates why Warner Brothers might
have made, on average, more good movies than any other studio during the Golden
Age of Hollywood. MGM was the biggest studio, and Paramount was the most
“classy,” but the average run of the mill production from Warner’s was usually tighter
and more fun than those of its competitors. Highly capable, if not particularly
inspired, direction from Irving Rapper, economical scripting from John Collier
and Joseph Than (adapting a play by Louis Verneuil), and gorgeous
cinematography from Ernest Haller, all make for a film that knows what it’s
doing. What kicks things up a notch, making this a superior example of the
Warner Brothers output, are the music of Erich Wolfgang Korngold and the
performances of Bette Davis and Claude Rains.
Along
with Max Steiner, Korngold defined the sound of Warner Brothers in the 30s and
40s. (For a few years in the mid-40s, they were joined by the great Franz Waxman.) Steiner was the studio work horse, often forced to compose an entire score in
only a few weeks, eventually tallying about 185 scores over the course of
thirty years at the studio. Korngold, on the other hand, was treated like a
prize horse, given months to work out his elaborate compositions, usually at
the rate of about two movies a year. (A former child prodigy who had matured
into one of the most respected composers in Europe until the rise of the Nazis
forced him to flee to America, he ended up being the “prestige” composer at
Warner’s.) For DECEPTION, Korngold composed a cello concerto for the film’s
climax, wherein Hollenius tortures Christine and Karel with the promise of a
masterful new concerto to showcase Karel’s skill and launch his career in
America. Korngold’s composition is such a moody triumph that he expanded it into
a full-length work, his Op. 37, the Cello Concerto in C.
To be honest, Paul Henreid almost always leaves me a bit cold, and his performance here is merely serviceable when another performer could have made Karel a truly haunted figure. He’s outmatched by Bette Davis, who holds the screen as well as any actor ever could. Whether she’s lying, making love, or just thinking, you can’t really take your eyes off of her. Having said that, however, the film is stolen right out from under its headliner by Claude Rains as the mad composer Hollenius. At his best, as he is here, there was really no better actor in the 1940s than Claude Rains. Whether he was the lovable crooked policeman in CASABLANCA or the murderous husband in NOTORIOUS (to name just two of his many, many supporting roles), he was always smoothly urbane, undeniably corrupted, and unmistakably human. Here he makes a Hollenius a tiny tower of insecurity, brilliance, and nonchalant cruelty. He’s the best thing about the movie.
