#elsa lanchester

The ads for Ray McCarey’s PASSPORT TO DESTINY (1944, TCM, YouTube) heralded Elsa Lanchester as “a one woman laugh invasion.” That she is, only the film starts to forget it toward the end.

She’s a Cockney scrubwoman during World War II who, on discovering her late husband’s good luck charm, decides to use it to guarantee her safety as she travels to Berlin to take out Hitler. She stows away on a ship headed to France, survives a shipwreck and then scrubs her way to Germany, where she passes herself off as unable to hear or speak. That lands her a job cleaning offices in the chancellery. But she also overhears the plight of a captain (Gordon Oliver) working with the resistance whose fiancée (Lenore Aubert) has been taken into custody. Naturally, she uses what she’s overheard to help them out, but that’s going to interfere with her original plan.

Lanchester is a delight. In one of the few U.S. films to give her a leading role, she dominates the screen with wit and grace. Her line readings of a not terribly good script are spot on and her physical comedy when she gets to hold the screen alone is often inspired. She has a few funny interactions with Fritz Feld as the chancellery’s chief janitor, though the film could use more of them. Had she had a good script and director with which to work, the film could have been a a cult favorite (contemporary audiences weren’t in the mood for a comedy about killing Hitler).

But the script is inane. She keeps talking to herself where she could easily be overheard. And though she’s perfectly capable of carrying a more dramatic scene, switching to heavy melodrama as the Nazis close in is a structural mistake. We want to see this plucky charwoman outsmart the enemy, even if we know she won’t achieve her objective. We don’t want to see her seriously threatened by them, even if we’re pretty sure she’s going to get out of this alive. And McCarey, the brother of Leo McCarey, doesn’t always know how to time a gag. When Lanchester is on her own, he just has to point the camera at her. But when there are other people involved, he can’t seem to get the timing or even the framing right. One pratfall in particular is hidden by the door that causes it. There’s also an in-joke: Lanchester’s late husband is represented by a picture of her off-screen spouse, Charles Laughton.  That’s good for a laugh once or twice, but McCarey keeps cutting to it to the point you wish they’d just used a stock photo of some extra.

BBC2 Dracula, Frankenstein and Friends (1977)

The Bride Of Frankenstein (1935)

BBC2 Dracula, Frankenstein and Friends (1977)

The Bride Of Frankenstein (1935)

BBC2 Dracula, Frankenstein and Friends (1977)

The Bride Of Frankenstein (1935)