THE MYSTERY OF MR. X
1934
Directed by Edgar Selwyn
Written by Howard Emmett Rogers and Monckton Hoffe (based on the novel X v. Rex by Philip MacDonald)
Edgar Selwyn took a crooked road to becoming a Hollywood director—and he probably didn't even need it—but it was inevitable that when he did, he wound up at MGM: at turns an actor, a playwright, and attempted suicide, Selwyn first came to true prominence as a Broadway producer and owner of (live) theaters alongside his brother Archibald, but in 1916 the siblings entered into a venture with a certain Szmuel Gelbfisz, aka Samuel Goldfish, to make movies; perhaps somewhat awkwardly, their studio was called Goldwyn Pictures, and, in a move that would've made me deeply uncomfortable had I been the Selwyns, Goldfish legally changed his name to Goldwyn, thereby purloining the last syllable of their surname to identify himself with their company; that probably wasn't the only exigence for throwing the newly-minted Goldwyn out on his ass, but the studio that now bore his name was, in time, merged with Metro, and with Mayer; and in 1929, Selwyn arrived in southern California to write and direct movies at the company where one-half of his name formed one-sixth of theirs, and which (while I can't confirm this) it seems like he ought to have still owned some fraction of.
That's a streamlined version of the life and times of Edgar Selwyn, but this isn't a biographical column. Selwyn's most notable directorial success came early in his tenure, where he introduced Helen Hayes to the screen in 1931's fallen woman melodrama The Sin of Madelon Claudet, and, getting a pretty great performance out of her, secured for Hayes an Oscar. Today, pretty much the entire remainder of his not-especially-considerable directorial output—related by marriage to Louis Mayer's boss, Marcus Loew, Selwyn had by the mid-30s been pulled upstairs as a producer—is obscure. It possibly tops out at 1932's Skyscraper Souls, a Grand Hotel kind of thing that, in fairness, had the precocity to come out before Grand Hotel. But obscure or not (it doesn't even have a commercial home video release), I suspect Selwyn's very last film as a director stands a strong chance of being his very best: this was The Mystery of Mr. X, a movie of great playfulness and pleasure that, going by his melodramas, good and bad alike, you wouldn't have necessarily figured Selwyn had in him. It's a thriller about a serial killer, though I aver it's still "playful" and "pleasurable" and all that. The serial killer is, ultimately, even somewhat incidental; at bottom, it's mostly a movie about Robert Montgomery being as charming as it's possible for Robert Montgomery to be, which is exceptionally fucking charming. (He does not, to be clear, play the serial killer.*)
The film was adapted from Philip MacDonald's novel, X v. Rex, with the name changed for what I really hope are obvious reasons, and depending on how you look at it, this adaptation was done with either reasonable faithfulness or with no fidelity at all; it's pretty much the same plot of the novel (with a few major differences) but sort of turned inside out structurally. The novel is a little potboiler regarding a one-man reign of terror in England, and it's decent stuff, honestly: I'd hesitantly forward that it even bears some literary ambition, in the way its serial killer yarn incorporates some epistolary qualities and frequent digressions, especially in a bizarre "kaleidoscope" sequence where MacDonald presents these giant block paragraphs of completely random facts about his fictional London alongside arbitrarily-arranged and tersely-presented plot points for the characters, all of which seems to be intended to reckon with the societal impact his serial killer plot would have on his country, though it sometimes juggles points-of-view past the boundaries of redundancy. It's obviously putting the reference before the referent, because (equally obviously) Jack the Ripper would have been at the forefront of MacDonald's mind too, but it's a bit like Alan Moore's From Hell, if From Hell weren't a stone cold masterpiece, and just sort of a goofed-up pulpy lark. (And also if From Hell were, perhaps odd to say given the surfeit of sex and Victorian sleaze in From Hell, hornier: MacDonald constantly overdescribes virtually every character's physicality as if he's jerking off to it, with an especial focus on big men—the number of times that one of his cast's enormous muscularity gets described might hit a good hundred, even though we heard him the first ninety-nine—yet he's happy to linger on his heroine's "white shoulders" too, as this also seems to turn him on.)
The huge difference, anyway, is that in X v. Rex, the hero—a charming criminal rake of great cleverness who insinuates his way into a serial killer investigation—does not fully resolve until something like literally the last page. The film's screenwriters, Howard Emmett Rogers and Monckton Hoffe (more the former than the latter, presumably, as the latter is credited solely with "additional dialogue"), clearly recognized this as suboptimal and indeed kind of annoying, perhaps even the work's most significant flaw—and I'd declare this correct, as it's not usually the best idea to present the clarification of your novel's premise as your final and only twist—and hence they flip The Mystery of Mr. X's protagonist around, so that his motivations are known the whole time, becoming reactively proactive, if that makes sense, rather than a figure prepared to do an absurdly inordinate amount of work just to keep the status quo in place so that he can commit his cool crimes later. It bears noting that neither the novel nor the film are ever "a mystery," at least in anything like the proper sense of that term, so while the film's title is better, it's also kind of bullshit. It's some extraordinary bullshit in connection with its trailer (I think as a re-release), which explicitly promises a mystery, and even does that kitschy thing where it portentously asks "WHO IS MR. X?" and then blasts you with a montage of the actors' still photos like one of them could be Mr. X, which they aren't, or that it even matters who Mr. X is, which it doesn't.
So: in London strikes the madman, X, whose victims are unusual—he is a serial killer of uniformed officers of the Metropolitan Police (this will be one of those American films that clearly understands "Scotland Yard" to be its official name), whom he finds as they walk their lonely beats through foggy London nights, ripe to be picked off one by one. (In a difference from the novel, he also sends letters to taunt his constabular adversaries.) This causes a mighty consternation for the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Herbert Frensham (Henry Stephenson), and all the more to his daughter Jane (Elizabeth Allan), and even more still to her fiance, Sir Christopher Marche (Ralph Forbes), because Sir Christopher, on a wild dare instigated by the drunken debauchery at his annual regimental dinner, has just accosted a cop to steal his helmet, and that cop, still in a daze after getting punched by a giant nob, is quite coincidentally killed by X immediately after this altercation. Fortunately for him, a certain Nicholas Revel (Montgomery) has pity for Christopher, because (this being the way that big difference from the novel manifests) Nick has lately been put in a similar quandary: he's a gentleman jewel thief and X killed a cop right outside during his latest heist, thereby tying the theft of the diamond to the campaign of cop murders, and there's no possible way to fence that stone with the heat on as high as it is.
Thus Nick arranges to forcefully intervene to turn that heat down, providing testimony alongside his cab-driving partner-in-crime Joe (Forrester Harvey) to the effect that they saw Christopher commit the battery, but that he could not have committed the murder**, thereby putting Nick in a position to meet Jane, with the ultimate object being to meet her father; with this accomplished, he's able to impress the old man with his insight into the X case and start the wheels turning on the fiend's capture. But there are a pair of complications: for one thing, police superintendent Connor (Lewis Stone) suspects that Nick isn't trying to help them catch X but that he is X; and, for two, he's met Jane, and despite her engagement they take a liking to one another well beyond what Nick had planned, though, as he's Robert Montgomery, he's quite happy to go with that, and it simply means he's got two reasons to capture X now.
This is, it may startle you to learn, not even a bit less contrived than in the novel, but a tremendous improvement anyway, because the sort of two-way battle that Nick must wage is entirely notional there, and it's the very essence of preposterous thrills here, kicking off with Montgomery's extremely disconcerted expression upon the discovery that a constable he'd otherwise have evaded or neutralized is actually a corpse. There's a nicely creative sense of the macabre throughout, in fact, to how the nebulous figure of X puts himself in position to commit his giant dagger murders. If the movie were less effervescent otherwise it could have easily been nudged into what we'd count, in the 1930s or even today, as "horror," and its disorienting opening sequence, that finds Selwyn craning his camera over a foggy dockyard and cinematographer Oliver T. Marsh resolving the shapes of policemen out of sordid shadows, has exactly that frisson, ending as an almost invisible assailant impales the poor bobby through the gaps of a wooden platform and scuttles like a crab off into the darkness beneath the pier.
But, predominantly, it's about whether Nick will get caught—or rather how Nick manages not to, despite the ever-greater pressure placed on him by Connor—to the extent that a few tricks of X from the novel wind up redeposited for our hero here. There's something immensely fun about the whole set-up—gentleman thief vs. terrorist is a premise of truly precious rarity, and it leans into the pulpy good time even more than the novel was willing to do (X's master plot achieves "cartoonish supervillainy" in its abstract purity here, and if you can even make out what he says his "motives" are, my hat's off to you.) But the most nail-biting thrills this movie about murder provides are, instead, clustered around our antihero and his diamond prize, most fizzily enjoyable when he's had to hide the stone in a glass of lager and precisely which glass gets slightly mixed up, and most tense when he's interrupted returning it to its clever hiding place in his lamp by the precipitous entry of Connor into his rooms, and Selwyn and Marsh are doing some things that seem almost futuristic with the shallow focus and ghastly light (Marsh was perhaps MGM's single most distinctive DP in the 1930s, and I believe that one really could identify the cinematographer of Letty Lynton here), all of it going to emphasize the threat that's constantly been looming up over Nick's shoulder—and now does so quite literally—while pinning us right up against Montgomery's desperate recalculations on Nick's behalf. And if, in this latter scene, Selwyn's staging somewhat requires us to fail to notice that our criminal mastermind doesn't lock his door behind him, well, it's a worthwhile price to pay.
But I do have to credit a great deal of the film's success to Selwyn, who, alongside editor Hugh Wynn—this was one of the last handful of movies he'd cut prior to his passing in 1935—was confronted with a story that's incredibly dense, let alone at 84 minutes, but has to move, and there's really hardly a misstep; The Mystery of Mr. X is a frivolity, but a very complicated one, full of numerous components jostling around inside it that have to be yoked together properly for it to go, and it's a wonder that we get storytelling this clear and concise and confident out of such a potential mess of parts. It is not, it's true, free of problems: the film momentarily loses some steam when it assumes you don't need to have your hand held as Nick's chosen "prize" shifts from the diamond to Jane, and he just sort of gives up in a way ill-befitting a master thief, or at least it's a little jarring for it to happen hafway through the third act; so maybe we needed our hands held a little more tightly than we got. (It's also curious how Chrstopher vanishes out of the movie, maybe as much a matter of realism as efficiency—he basically gets told to leave—though this means that one of the cuts the screenwriters made to the novel is a disapponting one, insofar as Nick never smacks him up. The good news is that the movie concludes with Nick and Jane together, instead of teasing that for roughly 267 pages then having Nick and Christopher become bros, reaffirming that Jane will marry the alcoholic nobleman dickhead and leaving one of the basic genre requirements of its story entirely unsatisfied; the movie's better ending may be a Richard Bolesalwski reshoot.) And there is, at last, a sense that Selwyn and Wynn might have been a bit overcome by the complex three-dimensional geography of their action-packed finale—there's a confusion, for example (albeit possibly a purposeful one even if it doesn't quite play), as to precisely whose head it is that's about to get sliced off by a descending elevator—but "wait! is somebody head's about to get sliced off?" is a problem that, in a 1934 thriller, frankly suggests something must be going right, and it all gets to occur amidst the scuzziest shadows Marsh can provide amidst a nightmare of an abandoned warehouse.
And above all, it's that this simply must be the Ultimate Robert Montgomery Star Vehicle. I have seen him in better movies, and, relatedly, I have seen Montgomery better used in movies that had an awareness of his limitations as an actor, and knew how to exploit those limitations for purposes to the side of "a good performance." (Namely his movies with Clarence Brown, though I'm thinking specifically of his callow, cowardly hypocrite who vaguely realizes he should be better than he is in Inspiration.) I have not, however, ever seen a movie better-built to exploit his strengths, nor a better proper use of the slippery affability and insincere smarm that are the hallmarks of his screen persona than with Nicholas Revel, who wears Montgomery's likeable dipshittery like a suit of armor. I don't know if it's Hoffe's "additional dialogue" or what, but I should make clear this is often a very funny movie, and Mongtomery's penchant for "doing a bit" with open artifice whenever he's called upon to have a charming exchange with a co-star, manifesting as a sense of self-absorbed delight at his own humorousness, is a big part of that.
I suppose I'm saying that Montgomery should basically always have played goofy drunk rich boys or, as here, confidence tricksters; and, because of the star system, he usually did, and though his movies vary considerably in quality, The Mystery of Mr. X is the most vindicated I've ever felt for always having a soft spot for the guy. He also frequently gets flak in these latterdays for so often playing British gentlemen, and not remotely trying to sound like anything but an American, but honestly his persona was made for agreeably douchey aristocrats who swan about like they own the place, even if in this case it's leavened considerably by how "swanning about like he owns the place" is a desperate pose put on in pursuit of proletarian goals. Altogether, the willingness to slightly mug for the camera is pretty great for Nick as the hero of a thriller: Montgomery's facade is constantly cracking here to express (and suppress) the dawning terror that his elaborate and fairly nonsensical plan is mere seconds away from falling the fuck apart—of course, he always pulls it back together because the cornerstone of any good caper is the mastery of its architect—and it's just extremely involving screen acting, however far away from "realistic" it may be. And even with all that, which would've been enough, through one of those larger cracks, opened up by his unexpected genuine feelings for Jane, Montgomery lets actual sincerity through for the first time in the whole film, and because of the charismatic shallowness of everything before it, it hits with surprising tenderness because even if she doesn't understand what he's really saying (though Allan implies she might), we do.
So, all told, it's pretty terrific stuff, dancing joyously across perhaps as many as half a dozen genres—horror, thriller, romance, caper, comedy, action, maybe even a touch of satire here and there (Harvey's Cockney cab driver shading into stupid obsequiousness before the judge, for instance, is a subtle but noticeable put-on for the benefit of a most easily-duped English upper class)—without seeming to notice that it's doing so, and modulated so well I don't know if I'd have noticed that it was doing so, except that I had to sit and write about it. In any case, it does all of them justice. The Mystery of Mr. X kind of has everything, so if I'm being conservative with the score, it's because it's only entirely perfect at being a Robert Montgomery movie, and not quite perfect otherwise; but even then, I could be underrating it.
Score: 9/10
*Thankfully, since nobody (including Montgomery) had any particularly bright ideas about how to go about that when he did play one a few years later, in Night Must Fall.
**Christopher's sentence? Ten days. (In the novel it's still just a freaking fortnight.) We used to be free, man.
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