Customer Reviews
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 - By: C. O. DeRiemer, 07 Jun 2007 
The Great Flamarion might be a poverty row knock-off of Scarlet Street, but it has much to offer to those fond of noirs & who like effective performances from unexpected sources. In Mexico Cityin 1936 at a second-string variety act theater, shots ring outin the middle of a clown act. The performers congregate back stage, the audience starts to panic & a clown tries to convince everyone to take their seats...that nothing has happened & everything is under control. We learn that a woman who was part of a bicycle act has been strangled & her husband is the chief suspect. But what were the gunshots for? Why did we seein the shadows a figurein a greatcoat & hat struggle to climb the stairs to the catwalk? Why has he hidden himself? We find out when everyone but the clown has left the theater. We learn that the man was The Great Flamarion (Erich Von Stroheim), an expert marksman, & this is his story...of a man brought low by his love of a heartless woman. Please note that elements of the plot are discussed.
Flamarion had a top-drawer variety act using two stooges & starring himself & his pistols. The audience would see a man & woman canoodling at a table when Flamarion would enterin formal dress. The man would hide, the woman would lift a glass of wine, & Flamarion 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. Then the man would come out of hiding & quickly weave back & forth among the light bulbs of a dressing table while Flamarion with split second timing would shoot out the bulbs, barely missing him. The audience would go wild.
Flamarion himself is a stern, no-nonsense older man with a bull neck & a shaved head. He has no friends & practices ceaselessly with his pistols. The two stooges are man & wife, a former second-rate dance act. Connie Wallace (Mary Beth Hughes) is a conniving temptress who collects men like other women collect bracelet charms. She has a baby face with lips as plump & lush as the red wax lips you buy for Halloween. Her husband, Al Wallace (Dan Duryea), is chump change. He's a drunk, a jealous man whose many weaknesses include loving his wife. He won't divorce her & she has other plans. "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." It's not long before Connie breaks through Flamarion's reserve & finds a lonely man ripe for the picking. He believes Connie loves him...and he believes Connie when she says Al will never let her go. It's not long before Flamarion makes an errorin his stage act & Al has a bulletin his heart. Then he learns that Connie has other ideas than marrying 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, who has disappeared. He even sells his pistols. By the time he learns that she might bein Mexico City & goes there, The Great Flamarion is just an unshaven, aging manin a rumpled, dirty suit. The only things he hasin his pocket are a few dollars...and a pistol. The whole movie has a sad, hopeless, inevitable air about it, & so does the conclusion. As a noir, it's not bad.
The story line is simple & is toldin flashback. It goes from A to B to C. What makes it interesting are the performances. Mary Beth Hughes as Connie turnsin a performance which is both sexy & heartless. Dan Duryea is excellent as a drunk mug way out of his depth with Connie. Duryea plays the drunk convincingly, but he also layersin the pity & the weakness. We don't like Al very much but we genuinely feel sorry for him. Erich Von Stroheim is the heart of the movie & he pulls it off. I suppose nowadays most people think of him only as one of Norma Desmond's former husbands who is now her butler. Von Stroheim always played the impassive Teuton. Even with the reserve he would bring to a part, he could hint at all kinds of submerged feelings. In The Great Flamarion, Von Stroheim has to show us a man who has improbably fallenin love & feels the joy of something he never expected. He's the grim, impassive Flamarion 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. We even see Von Stroheim do a little dance of anticipation when he thinks she's going to meet him at a hotelin Chicago. The Great Flamarion is no Scarlet Street, but the theme is the same. It's well handledin this Republic Pictures programmer.
The Alpha Video DVD transfer is awful. It's watchable, but that's about it. The picture is fuzzy, gray & with little contrast. Specks & lines show up frequently. It's hard to make out what's happeningin the dark scenes. There is often a low hiss. There are only six chapter stops placed arbitrarilyin the film. Unfortunately, this will probably be as good as it gets. If you like simple, interesting noirs & if you're intrigued by Erich Von Stroheim, I'd pick it up if the price is low enough.
Great Flamarion: great fun - but buy the French DVD edition! - By: Richard Bowden, 03 May 2007 Directed by the great Anthony Mann, starring the even greater Erich von Stroheim, & including a strong supporting role for a memorable Dan Duryea, The Great Flamarion is a cult film waiting to happen. The fact that it hasn't yet can be put down to the rarity of its appearances on TV (not leastin the UK - where there is no DVD available, either) or the poor versionsin which it only exists on region one, stateside. Onlyin 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 startedin B-movies, where he quickly made a mark for himself with some superlative film noirs such as T-Men (1947), & Border Incident (1949), films frequently characterised by striking monochrome cinematography as well as taut & assured direction. Appearing a couple of years before this first great periodin his output, The Great Flamarion anticipates some of the highlights of the films to follow, as it includes some especially noteworthy scenes with chiaroscuro & 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 initially played 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 adviserin the films of lesser men, his charisma & abilities on screen occasionally granting real star statusin such classics as La Grande Illusion (1937). His presence as Flamarion is a masterstroke, as the weight the actor brings to the role, & 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 partsin 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. Quite the contrary; but one is still aware of a great man working beneath himself, one whose fall from grace must have been as painful as Flamarion's from the catwalk above. Stroheim was one of a kind. And, as Mann admitted during the production of The Great Flamarion, where he & Stroheim apparently clashed: "He drove me mad. He was a genius. 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 famedin 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 & cheated character types, a splendid femme fatalein the form of Connie Wallace (Beth Hughes) as well as the presence of the archetypal noir fall-guy-come-villain, Dan Duryea. The underrated actor, who plays Wallace's unfortunate first husband, had a fine linein portraying whiners & shifty losers, which his role here allows him to make the most of. As Von Stroheim's alcoholic stage stooge Al Wallace, Duryea is perfectly cast, jealous of his own wife, alternating between self-loathing & marital depression as he cages his next drink from friends & boss. Asin his later noir work, Mann shows his skillin drawing out the perilous moments before violence, a process heightenedin one scene here by having the unknowing Wallace act out the part of target on stagein a parody both of real peril & an unfaithful wife caught with her lover.
Of course The Great Flamarion is not so greatin all respects; the cuckold-revenge plot is hardly original, & the dialoguein some scenes has been criticised. But if the film is ultimately less than the sum of its parts, then it's not for want of trying, nor for the talents it includes, before & behind the camera. Arguably, Mann would not make a really psychologically acute drama until the start of his great series of westerns with James Stewartin Winchester '73, five years later - also co-starring Duryea - taking advantage of the bigger budget & an altogether better script. Interestingly, asin that film, marksmanship is associated with honour here too, as Flamarion finds himself unable to shoot professionally on stage once his betrayal becomes clear. The crucial difference between the two films is thatin Winchester '73 the prized gun is won then stolen, leading to a vengeful Stewart's further wrath, whereas Flamarion's treasured shooters are dispiritedly sold by one whose self esteem is already broken. As the unfaithful wife Beth Hughes is very effective as the cause of that collapse: a woman whose scenes with the initially gun-proud Flamarion have been noted for an undercurrent of the erotic, due to the obvious symbolism of a gun barrel. However, Gun Crazy (1950) showed more persuasively how exciting the incendiary mixture of arousal & arsenal can really be, a B-movie that is even more successfulin its own terms. The infatuation between Flamarion & Connie ultimately remains one-sided, a lure that is largely unconsummated, either on the firing range orin the bedroom, & we never see the twoin either.
A highly recommended B-movie.
