CALCUTTA (1947)

It’s easy to understand why the studio bosses at Paramount would pair Gail Russell with Alan Ladd in Calcutta. She seems to fit the same mold as Veronica Lake, with whom Ladd struck gold on numerous occasions — beautiful, reserved, demure, vulnerable, and so forth. Russell was only hampered by her acting. She was cripplingly shy and suffered from what today would certainly be called a severe social anxiety disorder. Her story is one of Hollywood’s saddest. She was discovered while still in high school and placed under contract with Paramount as soon as she got her diploma. Her beauty was special in that she bore no particular resemblance to any existing famous faces. Her doe eyes, high cheekbones, and full lips were hers alone, and Paramount considered her a big investment for which they had high hopes. They worked on her acting skills and brought her along slowly, but whether it was due to a lack of talent or her personal difficulties she never caught on. She worked on a few big projects, including Angel and the Badman and Wake of the Red Witch opposite John Wayne and The Unseen with Joel McCrea, but despite the many opportunities afforded by her looks she was never able get her acting up to par. She found the courage to get in front of the camera through alcohol, and eventually got popped by the LAPD for driving drunk. In a testament to her personality, numerous industry-types, including Wayne, tried to help her get past her troubles, but it wasn’t in the cards for her. She died from a heart attack in a low rent Hollywood apartment at the lamentable age of 36.


The miscasting of Gail Russell is the most obvious problem with Calcutta, but it bears pointing out that replacing her with Lake would have been unlikely to salvage the picture. Lake too, being that they were similar performers with dissimilar talent, would have been miscast in the role of femme fatale Virginia Moore. That’s not to say that a demure, even girlish, leading lady couldn’t be effective as a black widow in the right picture — think Jane Greer — but it doesn’t work here. Russell was cast because the producers were hoping her type would once again strike lightning against Ladd’s brooding hero. However the exotic mystique of a film such as this demands an equally exotic leading lady — a highly sexualized, larger than life type: Hayworth, Mayo, Gardner — maybe even the other Russell, you get the idea. Not Gail Russell, not Lake, not even Greer. Someone involved in the production of the film recognized this early on and tried to spice up the movie with a sexy second lead. In this case it’s June Duprez, who outshines Russell by a mile, which only makes Gail look worse by comparison. Duprez, brunette and pretty as well (it gets confusing, they should have given her part to a blonde) gives the film a shot in the arm, and unlike Gail has a real spark with Ladd.


In 1947 Alan Ladd was still on top of the world. He looks great in Calcutta, like a man who is in his prime and knows it. He seems very comfortable playing the brooding, morose, tightly wound hero who seems to have no time for women and is struggling inwardly to get over the war. The film casts him as Neale Gordon, American ex-pat pilot now flying the Chungking / Calcutta route, along with air corps buddies Pedro (William Bendix) and Bill (John Whitney). When Bill turns up strangled, Neale and Pedro take a leave from the airline to hunt for his killer. They get mixed up in all sorts of far eastern intrigue, and cross paths with a variety of colorful Indian habitués, from the colonial authorities to urbane casino owners to native jewelry smugglers. Neale also gets involved with Virginia (Russell), who was engaged to Bill and seems to know more about his death than she lets on. One of the popular conventions of film noir, so far as femme fatales are involved, is that the hero’s first impression of the woman tends to be correct — even if she manages to pull the wool over his eyes. That’s certainly the case here, and it covers out a good deal of the running time. Neale’s first impression of his dead buddy’s girl is that she’s a no-good gold digger, though her girl-next-door approach thaws him out as they get to know each other better. In one of the pervasive ironies of noir, she helps him get to the bottom of the mystery, all the while aware of her own guilt.


When all is said and done, Calcutta amounts to little more than a routine potboiler. John Farrow’s direction and John Seitz’s cinematography are competent yet uninspired — disappointing considering that each made numerous quality film noirs, including two pretty good ones together: The Big Clock and The Night Has a Thousand Eyes. Farrow’s pacing is a too deliberate and the middle of the picture drags. Seitz does a fine job of masking the back lot locations, though he isn’t able to frame any of those exhilaratingly noirish shots as he creates in a move like The Big Clock. There are some good lines in Seton Miller’s script, though there aren’t enough of them to save the film. The best one comes in Ladd and Russell’s first scene together, when she tells him he’s “cold, sadistic, and egotistical.” His response “Maybe, but I’m still alive.” With the exception of Russell the cast is fine, though the two brightest spots, Bendix and Duprez, are M.I.A.: there are lengthy stretches that contrive to keep big Bill out of the film (ostensibly so Ladd and Russell can make time), that don’t work because the picture only comes to life when the two friends are together. Their chemistry is obvious in each of the eight films they made together and it’s nice to see them on the same side of the fence for once. If the forties had a character actor better than Bendix, which is very unlikely, it’s at least certain that Bill could take him in a fistfight.

Calcutta (1947)

Director: John Farrow

Cinematographer: John Seitz
Screenplay: Seton Miller
Starring: Alan Ladd, William Bendix, and Gail Russell.
Released by: Paramount
Running time: 82 minutes