Louis Hayward, Joan Bennett, And Alexandre Dumas: Two For The Price Of One

So, apparently Turner Classic Movies is the place to go for strange, obscure, generally not-good swashbucklers. (For the record, they show alot of good movies too.) Not long after my recent discovery of the abysmal The Black Knight, I was treated to a double bill of films starring someone I’d never heard of: Louis Hayward. One was entitled The Son of Monte Cristo, and the other The Man In the Iron Mask. Clearly, whenever my favorite author is invoked I become at least morbidly curious. So…

Starting with 1940’s The Son of Monte Cristo, I will say… wow, what a delightful mess of a film. I assume to capitalize off of a movie version of The Count of Monte Cristo that came out around that time, this strange thing grabs the basic title (public domain after all) and uses it to tell a ridiculous story that comes across more like an odd, low-budget mix between a Zorro story and The Prisoner of Zenda.

In 1865, (or thereabouts) the tiny, fictitious Balkan country of, erm, Lichtenburg, is being ruled with an iron fist by the tyrannical Gurko Lanen. Good Lord, that certainly is… a name, of some sort. The surprisingly Nazi-looking Lanen (whose main henchman is even named Zimmerman) is attempting to seize total power of Lichtenstein burg by way of a marriage to the Princess… er, something or other, I don’t remember her name. The only interesting piece of character development in the movie is that our villain seems also to actually be genuinely in love with her, which is a bit refreshing. Outside of that, he is another wonderfully sneering and smarmy George Sanders villain.

Enter young Edmund Dantes (we assume Jr., although it never gives him that exact suffix) who is on his way to Lichtenstein er, burg because Lanen (Jesus, these names) has asked for a loan. Apparently, the son of the Count of Monte Cristo is essentially a glorified banker, although he is also, of course, a dashing swashbuckling hero. This movie did leave me wishing that Louis Hayward had gotten to star in some really good swashbucklers (although maybe he did and I just haven’t seen them) because at times he actually managed to be quite charming, and even pass off his terrible one-liners as maybe a little funny.

Anyway, our new, young Count of Monte Cristo (he is, in fact, the Count, thereby intimating, though it’s never said, that the old one is dead) of course falls in love with the Princess, and in a big ol’ swordfight says something about his father being the best fencer in France. Further proof that it’s meant to follow some other, technically unconnected, movie, since there’s no swordfighting in the book proper. Moving on, our hero ends up in, sigh, Gurko’s palace, spying for the resistance while playing the part of an ineffectual fop, (and doing so waaaaaaay too over the top) until eventually he also creates a masked adventurer persona called The Torch. They make no bones about him essentially being Zorro.

My personal favorite moment was probably when someone, making a big speech about the hero, passionately calls him: “The son of a man who devoted his life to the struggle against persecution and injustice!” I may have gotten the wording a little off, but this was the gist.

Huh. Last I checked, the original Count was a bitter, manipulating, and frightening man obsessed with revenge. But hey, what do I know?

The thing is, for all its silliness, The Son of Monte Cristo is pretty fun–in a stupid way. If only it wasn’t so derivative, and didn’t hinge upon being badly connected to such a classic book. If they’d made it their own silly movie, without trying to rope Dumas into it, I would’ve liked it alot more. Still enjoyable though.

Despite being technically closer to its source material, 1939’s The Man In the Iron Mask is a far, far worse offender. This just goes to show that accuracy to a book isn’t always the best thing in a film.

For reasons I’ve gone into before, adapting this story is automatically a very hard one. I’ve never seen a film version that didn’t simplify far too much. For example, in every movie, between Louis XIV and his secret twin brother, one of the two is always “the evil one,” which is not the case in the novel. This particular version of the story is especially bad, as it raises Louis XIV to cartoonish villainy levels (and paints Louise de la Valliere as just some skeezer… which, for all the problems one can have with her as a character, isn’t quite the case).

The biggest problem with this one, though, is in casting Louis’ twin brother, Phillipe, as the real hero. Hayward pulls double duty as both twins, and Phillipe’s backstory is changed immensely. In this version he has been raised by D’artagnan, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis… all of whom apparently had nothing better to do with their lives for twenty years. It may make no sense, but it’s a (supposedly) good excuse for Phillipe to be a dashing, heroic type, who isn’t put into the titular iron mask until surprisingly late in the film.

Oh, by the way, said Iron Mask looks like the fucking Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz, complete with a jaw piece that moves when the man wearing it talks!! It’s really pretty funny.

Basically, every character is put along very simple lines: good and evil. That’s a bad enough thing to do to a book, but when the book uses historical figures it becomes comically ridiculous. Lest I sound like too much of a purist, I do love Douglas Fairbanks’ version, which is incredibly simplified and far from the book… but it knows that it’s just a silly action movie. That makes all the difference.

The only redeemable thing I found about the 1939 version was that Alan Hale makes a perfect Porthos. (Alan Hale is famous for having played Little John three different times, two of which are probably the best film versions of Robin Hood ever, bar none. Oh, and he’s also known for being the father of the skipper from Gilligan’s Island. Feh.) What little screen time Hale got as the character just made me ache at the thought of what would’ve happened if he’d ever gotten to be in a good version of a Musketeers story.

So yeah, not so great a film, although still probably not as much of a dismal waste as this one was. Shudder.