THE GOLDEN SALAMANDER (1950)

Archeologist David Redfern (Trevor Howard) is driving on a Tunisian mountain pass through a blinding storm when he is forced off the road by a landslide. As he begins to walk to town, he sees a truck, hit by the slide, and sees two men scooping up guns from the truck. Redfern manages to grab a gun without being seen. At the Café des Amis, he gets a room and meets the lackadaisical piano player Agno (Wilfrid Hyde-White) and a French woman named Anna (Anouk Aimee) who came to town with her brother Max while on the run from Nazis a few years earlier. Redfern is in town to catalog and oversee the shipment of valuable artifacts in the possession of the wealthy Serafis (Walter Rilla), but it's not long before he sees the two men from the landslide, the older Rankl (Herbert Lom) and the younger Max (Jacques Sernas, pictured to the left of Howard), and realizes they are engaged in illegal gunrunning. Redfern becomes good friends with Anna and Max, and when Anna expresses concern over Max’s relationship with the shady Rankl, Redfern offers to write a letter of introduction for Max, an aspiring artist, to use in Paris to extricate himself from the gunrunners. As Redfern continues his work for Serafis, he falls in love with Anna, and soon comes to see that the gunrunning outfit reaches farther and wider than he suspected. One of the artifacts has an effect on Redfern: a golden salamander with the engraving, "Not by ignoring evil does one overcome it, but by going to meet it." Soon, seeing that Anna and Max may be at the mercy of the bad guys, Redfern has to decide whether he will follow the wisdom of the salamander.

The rule persists: for the past ten years, if a movie on the home video market is called a film noir, it almost certainly is not. This, part of a set called British Noir, is no exception. But it is a solid thriller combining adventure, danger, romance and morality in a way that suggests a cross between Casablanca and a Graham Greene novel. Redfern is not a particularly heroic lead, but the film is in part about his moral journey. Actually, many of the characters spend at least some time in morally gray areas before they make the decision of how to act. The romance between Howard and Aimee, who are twenty years apart in age, is a little far-fetched. One of Howard's strengths is playing a fairly colorless everyman character, which he does here; one can see his attraction to her, but hers to him must be taken on faith (honestly, I kept waiting for her to either leave or betray him but it never happens). But both actors do well in their parts. Lom is always a welcome presence—as soon as you see his face in a movie of this era, you can feel the slimy sweat that will probably break out on him soon. Sernas is handsome, Rilla is commanding, Peter Copely has a nice moment or two as the chief native assistant to Redfern. But maybe the best role here is that of Agno, who we want to like but who is happiest working the middle. Hyde-White very much looks like singer and composer Hoagy Carmichael, whose most famous film role is as the laconic piano player in To Have and Have Not. Hyde-White seems almost to be channeling him and his importance to the plot grows. Ultimately, this may work better as a character study, as the suspense and tension are largely saved for the final scenes which include a boar hunt (a boar is actually shot dead on camera). Not a classic, perhaps, but quite watchable and interesting in its twists and turns. [DVD]