The Mask of Dimitrios

Hi Aki,

Tonight I watched The Mask of Dimitrios a 1944 Warners pic directed by Jean Negulesco. Negulesco was one of the house directors at Warners in the 40s, I don’t know anything more about him than that.

Story, adapted from the Eric Ambler novel, takes place in several countries in Europe in 1938 (i.e., prewar period) with flashbacks from as early as 1918.

In Istanbul, some young people playing along the beach discover a corpse washed ashore. In the lining of the suit is the man’s name: Dimitrios Makropoulis. In the official session of the Military Police, Colonel Haki announces that the case of Dimitrios Makropoulis is officially closed. Reporters want to ask questions, but the colonel dismisses them all. That night the colonel goes to a party given by a society dame. A Dutch writer (played by Peter Lorre) is vacationing in Istanbul when he meets the colonel, who turns out to be a fan of Lorre’s detective novels. He takes him out on the veranda to escape the nonsense of the women, and begins to tell him about Dimitrios – smuggler, spy, assassin, thief. He tells him the first and only case he was personally involved in, and a flashback shows us 1918 when Dimitrios, a young poor fig-packer, is desperate to leave Turkey, but needs money. He persuades his partner to go steal money from a local fence. Dimitrios murders the fence and finds the hidden cash-box. The partner is shocked at the killing, but he takes his share and proceeds to live it up. This sudden wealth arouses the suspicions of the police, who take him in and get him to confess to robbing the fence. ‘But I didn’t kill him, that was all Dimitrios!’ ‘Dimitrios? Where is this Dimitrios?’ But Dimitrios has left the country, and the partner is just as guilty of the killing as if he had done it himself.

Lorre talks the colonel into letting him see the body – ‘I have never seen a dead man before, and this Dimitrios fascinates me’ – and so they go to the morgue and Lorre gets to see the body (of course we don’t see the face).

Meanwhile a fat man is checking into a hotel in Istanbul, and wonders whether a certain ‘Constantine Gollis’ has checked in. No, and there is no record he ever stayed there. The fat man (played by Sydney Greenstreet) proceeds to the morgue himself, and tries to see the body, but he is too late – it has been ‘disposed of’ already.

In Colonel Haki’s office, Lorre learns more about the notorious career of Dimitrios, the countries he was in, the crimes he committed. There is not one photograph of the man on file, nobody knows what he looked like before they found his corpse. Lorre, yielding to his obsession with the diabolically clever man, determines to follow his trail and learn more about him.

First stop is Athens, where Dimitrios operated under the name of Talat. In the hall of records Lorre reads the file – it has few details other than birth date and ‘fig-packer’ as profession, enough to identify ‘Talat’ definitely as Dimitrios – but we see Greenstreet in the background – also there, we presume, to learn about Dimitrios. But Greenstreet leaves before Lorre meets him.

Lorre travels by train to Sofia, next stop in Colonel Haki’s summary. Greenstreet shares his sleeper, but doesn’t let Lorre know he too is interested in Dimitrios. In Sofia, Lorre interviews a local shady lady who runs a low-class bar and brothel. She tells how in 1921 she met a ragged, poor Dimitrios, and his dirty dealings: he gets money by blackmailing a rich man who is her lover; he becomes her lover himself, though he also frightens her with his cold-bloodedness, and he goes on to take a job to assassinate the country’s premier. He then takes money from her to make his getaway, and forces her to provide him with an alibi to the police.

When Lorre returns to his hotel room he finds it has been searched and there is Greenstreet holding a gun on him! After a talk, Greenstreet announces that he knows some things, and Lorre knows ‘one fact’ and if the bits are put together, they will mean a million french francs for them to split.

Greenstreet sends Lorre on to Geneva where, with an intro by Greenstreet, Lorre learns from a man named Groder about the espionage, gambling, blackmail and double-cross Dimitrios pulled in Belgrade in the late 20s.

Lorre goes on to Paris to meet Greenstreet as they arranged. Now Greenstreet hands Lorre a photograph and Lorre says it’s Dimitrios. But the photograph is of Constantine Gollis, not Dimitrios. Greenstreet, Gollis, and others were part of a French smuggling ring Dimitrios organized, and then betrayed – so he could take all their loot for himself. When they got out of prison, Gollis swore to kill Dimitrios and tracked him to Istanbul – but Dimitrios got to him first.

Now Greenstreet has his blackmail operation all planned: he will blackmail Dimitrios for a million francs, and he and Lorre will split it. Lorre is needed, because he has seen the dead man in Istanbul, and can swear to it that the corpse was really Gollis and not Dimitrios. Lorre wants to meet Dimitrios at last, but he wants nothing to do with blackmail or the money. Greenstreet is delighted with this arrangement, it means he gets all the money.

They work the blackmail on Dimitrios, now running the Asian Credit Trust bank, and a very wealthy man. Though Dimitrios tries to put killers onto them, Greenstreet outsmarts them. They get the money and go to Greenstreet’s place, where Greenstreet revels in the 1,000-sheet pile of mille-franc notes. But they notice an elegant hat on a chair…

Dimitrios is there with a gun. He had double, double-crossed them, and now he shoots Greenstreet. Lorre, driven to unusual fury at this, attacks Dimitrios, and the gun falls to the floor. The two men struggle, and Greenstreet, only wounded, manages to get hold of the gun. He holds Dimitrios at bay and tells Lorre to get out. Lorre goes out the apartment and half down the stairs. He hears three shots – but who shot whom? He goes back to see, and meets Greenstreet. Dimitrios at last is really dead. The police arrive, and Greenstreet happily goes to prison, after achieving his revenge. He tells Lorre to write a book about Dimitrios and send him a copy. ‘Where I’m going, I’ll have plenty of time for reading,’ he says.

The end.

The print was muddy, and not restored. It is hard then to say whether the lighting is all that good. The shadows are deep and rich but I suspect there are black areas that would in the original release have shown up as visible penetrable grays.

The chief appeal to the production is the re-teaming of Lorre and Greenstreet, who were first together in The Maltese Falcon and had been teamed in some other films at Warners where they were under contract. They make a good pair, the nervous little Lorre and the big, florid Greenstreet. In this case, two near-stars make for one full star, I suppose – it is a lot of fun to watch the two of them together.

The production has to recreate lots of European cities. It isn’t entirely convincing, what we get is sort of Hollywood-generic Europe rather than anything specific to Turkey, Greece, Yugoslavia, Switzerland, France. But the writers and Negulesco make every witness different, a character in his own right, along the way. They use a lot of map animations to convince us that the places are changing, and to help us understand where we are.

Maps are not used today; instead there is only a title superimposed on an image, say, ‘Belgrade.’ But the maps, with the animations of moving from Sofia to Geneva, really let us orient ourselves in space, and are a much more forceful and comprehensible way of indicating a big change in locale. Especially when the production doesn’t ever leave the Warners back lot or European street exteriors in Burbank.

Unfortunately for the production, Lorre is not empathetic enough, or Negulesco doesn’t treat him in a sufficiently empathetic manner. When all is said and done, we get an interesting tale that is put together like a jigsaw puzzle of flashbacks. Zachary Scott plays Dimitrios, and he is only fair – he lacks the grand flair of a true movie villain, and doesn’t exactly inspire us with awe for his brilliance or dread of his knavery.

(written around 12 March 2009)