I’d never heard of film blanc as a genre before catching THE NIGHT MY NUMBER CAME UP (1955) on DVD but the term goes back to the 1970s. Film noir emphasizes corruption, cynicism (you can clean up some corruption, but not all of it) and bad things happening for no reason — “fate or god or something like that can put the finger on me or you for no reason at all” in the words of Detour. Film blanc has god or supernatural forces putting their finger on the scale to make things better: It’s a Wonderful Life, Here Comes Mr. Jordan, Cabin the Sky, The Bishop’s Wife, etc. Unlike noir, there is a moral order to the blanc universe.
This film shouldn’t work as well as it does. It’s the kind of thing Twilight Zone would have tossed off in 30 minutes: Lindsay (Michael Horden) opens the movie by telling an American officer in the Far East where to find a recently vanished plane. How does he know? He won’t say. Then we flash back to Lindsay at a party, telling his friends about a dream in which the plane they’re taking to Tokyo crashes on the coast. They’re not worried: Lindsay’s dream has eight passengers (they have six), there’s no loudmouth businessman, no problem! Except as the movie progresses, things change and it’s looking more and more similar to the dream …
Yet it does work, very well. It’s tense, absorbing drama, helped by having a solid cast including Michael Redgrave and a young Denholm Elliott. I recommend it highly. In case you’re wondering, the movie that I confuse this with is the David Niven drama A Matter of Life and Death. “Is this your idea of leadership? To lead these people to certain death!”
I tend to think AN INSPECTOR CALLS (1954) is connected to Green for Danger, which also stars Alistair Sim as an inspector; it isn’t, nor is it as good. Based on JB Priestley’s stage play, it’s a “message” drama, and as the phrase goes, they should have sent the message Western Union. Spoilers follow.
We open in 1912 as a rich family — industrialist father, socialite mother, drunken son, spoiled daughter — celebrate the daughter’s marriage to a handsome, wealthy man. Suddenly Inspector Poole stalks into the dining room, at which point I knew he was some kind of phony: no British investigator would do that without being announced. Poole reveals a young woman just committed suicide by drinking bleach and he’s wondering, do any of them know her?
Boy, do they. The father fired Eva (Jane Wenham) for requesting his factory pay higher wages; the daughter got her fired from a salesclerk job because she snickered at an awkward moment; the fiancee had a brief romance with her; the wastrel son had a romance that ended with her pregnant; the mother, sitting on a charity committee decided Eve was a trollop and refused to offer her any aid (the committee wanted her to name the father; for obvious reasons she didn’t think “it’s your son!” would fly). OMG, the entire family is guilty!!! The entire class system is guilty!!!!
But wait, there’s another twist! First a call to the morgue establishes no girl has been brought in as Poole claims — he’s a fraud! Having left the inspector in his windowless study the father goes to confront him — he’s gone! Vanished! And suddenly they get a call from the hospital that now a girl had died in the fashion described … which is a pointless added twist as it doesn’t change anything (if they’d had a chance to save her and refused to act …). A flop, though the play was revived quite successfully in the 1990s. “You and I aren’t the same persons who sat down to dinner.”
All rights to images remain with current holders.




























