The Films of Henry Hathaway

Henry Hathaway | Diplomatic Courier | 23 Paces to Baker Street

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Henry Hathaway

Henry Hathaway was a prolific director of Hollywood films.

Diplomatic Courier

By 1952, the semi-documentary cycle had clearly run its course. Diplomatic Courier (1952) is one of the last semi-docs from a major studio. Diplomatic Courier is odd, in that the beginning of the film is a semi-documentary in form and content, while the later parts of the film are thriller-like, with few semi-doc aspects.

The Semi-documentary beginning

Diplomatic Courier starts out like one of Hathaway's semi-docs, then changes its mind, and turns into a spy thriller. Its lead character is a US State Department courier (Tyrone Power). During the first half hour, it concentrates on Powers' work as a courier, and is constructed in a fashion similar to Hathaway's earlier semi-docs. Like other semi-docs, it involves a US Government institution. Here the film opens with an inside look at the State Department, as a narrator intones in the approved semi-doc manner.

Semi-docs typically focus on the high technology used by the government agency. Here we see the coded teletypes used by the Department to transmit secret messages. The coding machine is fascinating, looking much like a large early computer. We are also sent to a projection room, where messages to and from Europe to Washington are projected on a screen during their process of being sent. Hathaway had previously focused on the high tech long-distance transmission of information in the finale of Call Northside 777 (1948), which depicted the sending of photographs over telephone lines. It shows the technological progress that has been made since 1952, to realize that everyone today has the capability to send and encrypt e-mail, using facilities far more elaborate than these Government agents had back then.

I have never seen the inside of the US State Department in any other film. It is unclear whether this movie was shot on location, or whether the studio built sets depicting these offices. They are far more workaday, being filled with technological devices, than I had imagined. They are not at all ornate. They actually look a bit like the technology departments of a film studio, and one wonders if they were actually shot somewhere on the Fox lot.

After this, we see Tyrone Power sent on his courier mission, and learn a little bit about how such couriers operate.

Unfortunately, at this point Power's mission is sabotaged by spies. Power is soon working with US Army Intelligence officers, and the film turns into a spy thriller. The semi-doc aspects of the film stop cold. We never see anything more about Power's courier work or the US State Department again. The narration stops too. So do most of the semi-doc style efforts to location shoot in Europe.

Characters in the spy part of the film

The spy melodrama in the later part of Diplomatic Courier is not very good. None of the characters is remotely believable, although Karl Malden's Army Sergeant is in there trying. Malden's performance is a cut above his confreres here.

Power is one of Hathaway's refined, sensitive heroes, thrown in among a bunch of much rougher characters, both the villains, and such Army tough guys as Malden.

Power's tough treatment by Army Intelligence colonel Stephen McNally recalls Victor Mature's mistreatment by DA Brian Donlevy in Kiss of Death. In both cases, we are meeting a social authority figure of dubious ethics, a man who is far more concerned about meeting his objectives, than about how the human beings he is exploiting might get hurt. McNally's character is willing to send Power to his death, if it will just smoke out Soviet spies and help recover the lost coded message. These authority figures are pretty creepy.

Hildegarde Neff repeatedly talks in the film about how much Tyrone Power and his murdered friend had loved each other. The two had been Navy buddies, and had shared their lives. Such elegies for a murdered friend recall John Cromwell's Dead Reckoning (1947), where Humphrey Bogart is concerned over his lost partner.

Trieste

The plot involves a coded message about Stalin's proposed invasion of Yugoslavia. Much of the film takes place in Trieste. This is a fascinating subject. Unfortunately, the film makers do little with it, treating it instead as a MacGuffin driving forward a routine spy plot. The best location scenes in Trieste involve a chase through what seems to be the ruins of a Roman amphitheater. Power falls over the edge of a stairway here, one of many sequences in Hathaway involving falling from a height. He is realistically knocked out, and the event is quite scary looking.

23 Paces to Baker Street

This is a well done mystery story. It is part suspense, part detection. Despite its title, 23 Paces to Baker Street (1956) has nothing to do with the Sherlock Holmes stories. Instead, it is an adaptation of Philip MacDonald's mystery novel, Warrant For X (1938).

Although Hathaway was a pioneer of film noir, 23 Paces to Baker Street probably can't be classified as such. The hero is a successful playwright, and his surroundings of secure, middle class gentility do not qualify as noir. The hero is played by Van Johnson, the perennial nice guy of MGM flicks, and he does not come across as the sort of obsessed, alienated man that Alain Silver has identified as the essential noir protagonist. Furthermore the film is in color. The film instead should be seen as a part of a long tradition of screen mysteries and whodunits, a genre associated more with the 1930's and early 40's than the 1950's.

Similarities to other Hathaway Films

MacDonald's story has been adapted in ways that bring it into line with Hathaway's previous films:

The identity of the villain, who is famously never actually seen in MacDonald's novel, has been changed. There is now an ingenious plot twist recalling Hathaway's The House on 92nd Street (1945). The story of that film was written by Charles G. Booth.
MacDonald's book is filled with amateur detection. The film version has been scripted to make the detection look like the lengthy search through the laundries of New York in Hathaway's The Dark Corner (1945), one of the best sequences in that film. In 23 Paces to Baker Street the hero searches first through groups of nobles living on a certain street, later through a passenger list.
The hero is an embittered, wounded man aided by a loving supportive heroine, who used to be his secretary; this is also like the hero and heroine of The Dark Corner.
The villains are thoroughly vicious, stalking the streets of London and bumping off people left and right; this is like the menacing bad guys of Hathaway's Kiss of Death (1947).
Suspense sequences in Hathaway often involve height, open heights from which someone might fall. In Niagara, there is the climb to the tower; in Kiss of Death, the stairs sequence; in 14 Hours, the whole movie is on a skyscraper ledge. In 23 Paces to Baker Street the suspense centers around an open half-bombed building, and later around a staircase leading to the apartment. These are suspense sequences, little islands of thriller material embedded in the whodunit plot.

Fog, Mist and Water

The many fog scenes are appropriate for a London thriller; they also recall the mists at the end of Kiss of Death.

Niagara and 23 Paces to Baker Street both have scenes in which the characters get wet - the walk under the spraying falls in Niagara, the scene where the butler follows a suspect in the rain in 23 Paces to Baker Street. Hathaway likes misty, wet or foggy weather.

The visuals in 23 Paces to Baker Street resemble those in Niagara. In both films, we frequently see spectacular water landscapes through open windows: in 23 Paces to Baker Street, a view of the Thames through the hero's apartment balcony. This underlines the location filming approach: even in interiors, Hathaway is shooting on real locations. It emphasizes the semi-documentary nature of the films.

Frontal staging and use of architecture

There is much London location photography in 23 Paces to Baker Street. Stylistically, it recalls Hathaway's mid 1940's location filmed semi-documentaries. Even the title has a number in it, "23", recalling Hathaway semi-docs.

The most beautiful scene in the film is shot in a London park. Here Hathaway shows his fondness for ornamental grill work, something that appears in almost all of his location shot films.

Hathaway tends to shoot the locations frontally, with a building, doorway or piece of grillwork exactly parallel to the plane of the screen. This makes the background extremely easy to see and understand. The characters are often framed by doors or windows. There is a geometric quality to these - each character has their own background region of rectilinear space.

23 Paces to Baker Street and later films

23 Paces to Baker Street anticipated some dramatic works that came after it. It looks a lot like Midnight Lace (1960), the Doris Day thriller in which she is menaced in the London fog, and in an apartment much like Van Johnson's in the previous film, several stories above a London street. Both films have disbelieving Scotland Yard inspectors, and both have suspense sequences involving dangerous heights in half constructed buildings.

The blind hero of 23 Paces to Baker Street also anticipates that of Frederick Knott's Wait Until Dark (1966), as does the film's final sequence.