John Brahm

Nightmare Atmosphere

One of many German emigres who landed in Hollywood by the late 1930s, John Brahm is best known today for two matching period thrillers he made with Laird Cregar, The Lodger (1944) and Hangover Square (1945), a very twisty and Freudian noir called The Locket (1946), which famously features a flashback within a flashback within a flashback, and a Raymond Chandler adaptation called The Brasher Doubloon (1947). This is a career that fluctuates according to both opportunity and interest; it is easy to detect what projects stimulated Brahm’s creativity and which did not.

He was born Hans Brahm in 1893 in Germany, and he came from a distinguished theatrical family; his father was an actor, and his uncle Otto Brahm was a noted theatrical impresario. Brahm worked as an actor himself, served in World War I, and then began directing theater troupes in Berlin in the 1920s. Leaving his native country after the rise of Hitler, Brahm landed first in England and was a production supervisor before being given the chance to direct Broken Blossoms (1936), an ill-advised sound remake of D.W. Griffith’s classic 1919 silent film.

Brahm gets some very pretty visual effects for his debut, and he gives some glamorously lit close-ups to Dolly Haas, who was his second wife (his first wife, also an actress, had abandoned him for another man, which left him seriously depressed in his youth). His style in this first movie is showy, as if he is trying to prove what he can do, and it has an essential cheerfulness that so goes against the grain of the morbid story that the film winds up having no dramatic impact.

Brahm was a director who at first focused on style and atmosphere and neglected character and plot, and this held true for his first movies in America, which were mainly made for Columbia. He showed a welcome sense of humor in Girls’ School (1938), where some lovely young ladies are kept in line by macho Marjorie Main and Cecil Cunningham; he keeps his camera as close to the actors as possible and delights in foregrounded objects and the smoothest camera moves.

But Brahm’s enthusiasm got the better of him for Let Us Live (1939), which he fills with visual ideas while allowing Henry Fonda and especially Maureen O’Sullivan to badly overdo their performances as unjustly accused man and outraged fiancée. In his early films, it often felt as if Brahm was being given subjects that had already been covered by major directors (Let Us Live is very close in subject matter to Fritz Lang’s great You Only Live Once {1937}) only to inevitably fall short by comparison.

But in 1942 he moved to Twentieth Century Fox and showed a talent for the macabre in a horror picture called The Undying Monster, where his skill with atmosphere led to subjective camera scenes that intensified the terror of a family being stalked by an unknown enemy. Brahm’s greatest enthusiasm on screen is always reserved for the most frightening way to put across a scary scene, and he began to allow some German expressionist visual ideas to aid him; he has a love for low angles where the visible ceiling starts to seem like it is going to attack his players or fall in. Even the furnishings of the main house here look menacing, with a staircase studded by large pointed structures that appear as if they could stab you through, and even the lamps in this picture, which Brahm likes to frame to the side or to the center of his compositions, look like they have wicked intentions.

Brahm’s talent came fully into its own for The Lodger, a huge step forward for him where his usual energy is focused for maximum effect on telling the tale of a sick man (Laird Cregar) who might be Jack the Ripper. The way Brahm frames Cregar as his character zeroes in on a lovely showgirl (Merle Oberon) achieves the maximum tension, and when Cregar’s murderer is on the loose at the end, Brahm is so assured with his mise en scène and the baroque flow between shots that the effect is like a singer hitting and sustaining a high C as Cregar crawls like a monster towards the camera.

Brahm took this air of flamboyant menace even further with Hangover Square, which is memorably aided by a score from Bernard Herrmann that includes a thunderous piano concerto for Cregar’s composer character that so delighted a young Stephen Sondheim that he sat through the movie twice in order to memorize what he could of the music. Brahm has a rapport with Cregar, a large man, six foot three, with staring eyes and a hushed, hallucinatory voice, who died shortly after finishing their second movie partly due to the effect of crash dieting.

It was after these two fine films with Cregar that Brahm made perhaps his best picture, The Locket, which has as labyrinthine a plot as any movie of its era and a way of making nightmarish forebodings based on childhood fears look upsettingly persuasive. At its center is the enigmatic Nancy (Laraine Day), a hard-smiling sociopath who is unwittingly driven by needs and desires from her past. Brahm visually emphasizes a painting of Nancy done by one of her lovers (Robert Mitchum) in which she has no eyes, and he builds steadily to a climax where various people from Nancy’s past start speaking to her from a carpet she is staring at as she marches down the aisle to get married. The complications of the plot could be absurd, but Brahm controls this movie to such an extent that he makes it unnerving.

Day, a journeyman player in other films, pushes herself very hard in The Locket to be this naggingly incomplete woman who leaves nothing but destruction in her wake (she does Anne Baxter better than Anne Baxter herself generally did), and Brahm gets surreal visual effects here that linger long in the memory. The Locket is also a movie that asks a key question: if we see something on screen, did it happen? This was an issue that later preoccupied Hitchcock, and Brahm’s dreamy style leaves this issue tantalizingly uncertain.

Brahm’s love of foreboding atmosphere also aided his Philip Marlowe movie The Brasher Doubloon, where George Montgomery’s Marlowe is a libidinal wolf, much younger and smoother than this character is usually portrayed. By the 1950s, Brahm was working more in Europe, and he directed a Maria Montez picture called The Thief of Venice (1950) that has a near-Wellesian brio in its opening scenes, utilizing super-low angles and off-kilter framing; as an exercise in style, it is top-notch, and Montez gives a spirited performance. By the mid-1950s, Brahm was working for television, and he did quite a few episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, but his best films of the mid-1940s should secure his reputation.