Evengyny Thanks for the memories!

AniInterview Sorry, this movie sucks

VeteranLight I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

Kirandeep Yoder The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

karen5778 If you love Erich von Stroheim and Dan Duryea, this early film by Anthony Mann is for you. Duryea and von Stroheim are both great at all the little things that come between the words and the dialogue is good, too, not surprising as one of the screenwriters, Heinz Herald, won an Oscar for "Dr. Erlich's magic bullet" and was nominated for "The Life of Emile Zola". The story is imaginative, the whole thing is pretty good. I have to write ten lines of review without any spoilers, which is hard for this movie, although the plot twists are not exactly unpredictable. It's really von Stroheim's movie, which you can't say very often.

kidboots William Lee Wilder was the older brother of Billy Wilder and "The Great Flamarion" was his first motion picture production. He didn't have a lot of flair but he did put Anthony Mann on the ladder to directorial fame and he also used a couple of great actors in Erich Von Stroheim and Dan Duryea. The film had a European flavour (it was adapted from a Vicki Baum story "The Big Shot") and Stroheim was perfect as an obsessed vaudevillian - a role he had perfected in "The Great Gabbo" (1929). He drew viewer's attention in every scene he appeared.A shot is heard throughout a Mexico City music hall - when a man falls from the rafters, Tony an old trouper, recognises Flamarion (Erich Von Stroheim), once the world's greatest sharp shooter. Dying, Flamarion tells his story:- Flamarion lived only for his work until he fell in love with Connie (Mary Beth Hughes), who with her husband Al (Dan Duryea) form Flamarion's shooting act. Connie and Al seem happily married, but behind closed doors her ruthless ambition has turned him into an alcoholic and rumour has it she is having an affair with Eddie (Stephen Barclay), a cyclist with the troop. Connie leads Flamarion to think she cares about him but her motive is to convince him to kill Al during a performance and make it look like an accident. He does and the coroner believes Al died due to his own drunken miscalculations. Connie and Flamarion agree to meet in Chicago, but she has her own plans that include Eddie, not Flamarion and he waits at the hotel in vain. To me, the best scene in the film is where Von Stroheim does a little dance in his eager anticipation to soon be with Connie.He sets out to find her and eventually traces both Connie and Eddie performing at a cheap theatre in Mexico City. He upbraids her for her duplicity but Connie pretends she still loves him - all the time reaching for his gun to shoot him. With his ebbing strength he strangles her before crawling away to die.Is there another actor more under-rated than Dan Duryea. He was a stage actor who was bought to movies to repeat his success in the stage play "The Little Foxes" but soon found himself in demand playing everything from pimps and spongers ("Scarlet Street" (1945), "Too Late For Tears" (1949)) to saddle tramps ("Black Bart" (1948)). "The Great Flamarion" presented him with a rare sympathetic role and as usual he perfected it. Mary Beth Hughes, originally a blonde bit player ("These Glamour Girls" (1939)) went back to her natural hair color (red) and became a noir cult favourite. Martha Vickers can be glimpsed as a chorus girl in the first scenes.Recommended.

Terrell-4 The Great Flamarion might be a poverty row knock-off of Scarlet Street, but it has much to offer to those fond of noirs and who like effective performances from unexpected sources. In Mexico City in 1936 at a second-string variety act theater, shots ring out in the middle of a clown act. The performers congregate back stage, the audience starts to panic and a clown tries to convince everyone to take their seats...that nothing has happened and everything is under control. We learn that a woman who was part of a bicycle act has been strangled and her husband is the chief suspect. But what were the gunshots for? Why did we see in the shadows a figure in a greatcoat and hat struggle to climb the stairs to the catwalk? Why has he hidden himself? We find out when everyone but the clown has left the theater. We learn that the man was The Great Flamarion (Erich Von Stroheim), an expert marksman, and this is his story...of a man brought low by his love of a heartless woman. Flamarion had a top-drawer variety act using two stooges and starring himself and his pistols. The audience would see a man and woman canoodling at a table when Flamarion would enter in formal dress. The man would hide, the woman would lift a glass of wine, and Flamarion would use his pistols to shatter the glass, light her match, shoot off a garter, and use bullets to take off the tiny ornaments on her hair comb. Then the man would come out of hiding and quickly weave back and forth among the light bulbs of a dressing table while Flamarion with split second timing would shoot out the bulbs, barely missing him. The audience would go wild. Flamarion himself is a stern, no-nonsense older man with a bull neck and a shaved head. He has no friends and practices ceaselessly with his pistols. The two stooges are man and wife, a former second-rate dance act. Connie Wallace (Mary Beth Hughes) is a conniving temptress who collects men like other women collect bracelet charms. She has a baby face with lips as plump and lush as the red wax lips you buy for Halloween. Her husband, Al Wallace (Dan Duryea), is chump change. He's a drunk, a jealous man whose many weaknesses include loving his wife. He won't divorce her and she has other plans. "Connie," he tells her, "no matter what you do you're the only dame for me. You're a bad habit I can't cure...even if I wanted to. Any guy who wouldn't fall for you is either a sucker or he's dead." It's not long before Connie breaks through Flamarion's reserve and finds a lonely man ripe for the picking. He believes Connie loves him...and he believes Connie when she says Al will never let her go. It's not long before Flamarion makes an error in his stage act and Al has a bullet in his heart. Then he learns that Connie has other ideas than marrying him. From then on we witness the downward trajectory of Flamarion as he realizes how he was used. He spends his money searching for Connie, who has disappeared. He even sells his pistols. By the time he learns that she might be in Mexico City and goes there, The Great Flamarion is just an unshaven, aging man in a rumpled, dirty suit. The only things he has in his pocket are a few dollars...and a pistol. The whole movie has a sad, hopeless, inevitable air about it, and so does the conclusion. As a noir, it's not bad. The story line is simple and is told in flashback. It goes from A to B to C. What makes it interesting are the performances. Mary Beth Hughes as Connie turns in a performance which is both sexy and heartless. Dan Duryea is excellent as a drunk mug way out of his depth with Connie. Duryea plays the drunk convincingly, but he also layers in the pity and the weakness. We don't like Al very much but we genuinely feel sorry for him. Erich Von Stroheim is the heart of the movie and he pulls it off. I suppose nowadays most people think of him only as one of Norma Desmond's former husbands who is now her butler. Von Stroheim always played the impassive Teuton. Even with the reserve he would bring to a part, he could hint at all kinds of submerged feelings. In The Great Flamarion, Von Stroheim has to show us a man who has improbably fallen in love and feels the joy of something he never expected. He's the grim, impassive Flamarion most of the time, but we also see his heart being torn apart by Connie, we see his smile of sheer happiness when he thinks she loves him. We even see Von Stroheim do a little dance of anticipation when he thinks she's going to meet him at a hotel in Chicago. The Great Flamarion is no Scarlet Street, but the theme is the same. It's well handled in this Republic Pictures programmer.

FilmFlaneur Directed by the great Anthony Mann, starring the even greater Erich von Stroheim, and including a strong supporting role for a memorable Dan Duryea, The Great Flamarion is a cult film waiting to happen. The fact that it hasn't yet can be put down to the rarity of its appearances on TV (not least in the UK - where there is no DVD available, either) or the poor versions in which it only exists on region one, stateside. Only in France apparently can there be found a decent edition, as over there they presumably know a good thing when they see it.Anthony Mann's career started in B-movies, where he quickly made a mark for himself with some superlative film noirs such as T-Men (1947), and Border Incident (1949), projects frequently characterised by striking monochrome cinematography as well as taut and assured direction. Appearing a couple of years before this first great period in his output, The Great Flamarion anticipates some of the highlights of the films to follow, as it includes some especially noteworthy scenes with chiaroscuro and expressionistic lighting effects, as well as exhibiting what once critic has identified as a consistent theme of this director: that of a hero haunted by past trauma. In the case of The Great Flamarion it's the turn of the eponymous, dying, theatrical sharpshooter, played initially as a martinet by Erich von Stroheim: a man driven by his most recent betrayal as well as haunted by a doomed romance of some years before.Von Stroheim's career as a great silent director arguably reached a pinnacle with Greed (1924) before crash-diving through allegations of budgetary extravagance, orgies on set, as well as his own professional disdain for the front office. After Queen Kelly (1929) he never really directed again, instead existing as a character actor or technical adviser in the films of lesser men, his charisma and abilities on screen occasionally granting real star status in such classics as La Grande Illusion (1937). His presence as Flamarion is a masterstroke, as the weight the actor brings to the role, and the sad decline of the proud, arrogant shooting master he portrays is inevitably complemented by the real life pathos of a giant of cinema, reduced Welles-like, to B-movie parts in order to keep the wolf from the door. (A similar feeling attends another, ultimately pathetic, variety turn also essayed by Stroheim: the ventriloquist The Great Gabbo, 1929.) Not that Mann's film is at the poverty row level of inspiration of such other vehicles for the actor as The Lady And The Monster, made two years before. Quite the contrary; but one is still aware of a great man working beneath himself, one whose fall from grace must have been as painful as Flamarion's from the catwalk above. Stroheim was one of a kind. And, as Mann admitted during the production of The Great Flamarion, where he and Stroheim apparently clashed: "He drove me mad. He was a genius. I'm not a genius, I'm a worker." Von Stroheim apparently took a particular dislike to the flashback structure of Mann's work, perhaps not surprisingly for a silent director famed in his heyday for his realism, thinking that it was crafted to make the film seem 'more important' than it was. Whether or not this is true, the device is typical of film noir a genre to which The Great Flamarion is closely related, through its portrayal of doomed and cheated character types, a splendid femme fatale in the form of Connie Wallace (Beth Hughes) as well as the presence of the archetypal noir fall-guy-come-villain, Dan Duryea. The underrated actor, who plays Wallace's unfortunate first husband, had a fine line in portraying whiners and shifty losers, which his role here allows him to make the most of. As Von Stroheim's alcoholic stage stooge Al Wallace, Duryea is perfectly cast, jealous of his own wife, alternating between self-loathing and marital depression as he cadges his next drink from friends and boss. As in his later noir work, Mann shows his skill in drawing out the perilous moments before violence, a process heightened in one scene here by having the unknowing Wallace act out the part of target on stage in a parody both of real peril and an unfaithful wife caught with her lover.Of course The Great Flamarion is not so great in all respects; the cuckold-revenge plot is hardly original, and the dialogue in some scenes has been criticised. But if the film is ultimately less than the sum of its parts, then it's not for want of trying, nor for the talents it includes, before and behind the camera. Arguably, Mann would not make a really psychologically acute drama until the start of his great series of westerns with James Stewart in Winchester '73, five years later - also co-starring Duryea - taking advantage of the bigger budget and an altogether better script. Interestingly, as in that film, marksmanship is associated with honour here too, as Flamarion finds himself unable to shoot professionally on stage once his betrayal becomes clear. The crucial difference between the two films is that in Winchester '73 the prized gun is won then stolen, leading to a vengeful Stewart's further wrath, whereas Flamarion's treasured shooters are dispiritedly sold by one whose self esteem is already broken. As the unfaithful wife Beth Hughes is very effective as the cause of that collapse: a woman whose scenes with the initially gun-proud Flamarion have been noted for an undercurrent of the erotic, due to the obvious symbolism of a gun barrel. However, Gun Crazy (1950) showed more persuasively how exciting the incendiary mixture of arousal and arsenal can really be, a B-movie that is even more successful in its own terms. The infatuation between Flamarion and Connie ultimately remains one-sided, a lure that is largely unconsummated, either on the firing range or in the bedroom, and we never see the two in either. Recommended.