The Green Glove (1952)

I had wanted to see The Green Glove for a long time. I’m sure other film fans find themselves in the same predicament: so many films to see, so little time. Glenn Ford in the starring role of Michael Blake was a big draw for me. Ford is one of my favorite film noir actors, and the producers of this film must have thought he was big box office draw because he gets top billing (unless you count the producers’ credits).

You can find The Green Glove online. Click here to see it for free at the Internet Archive. I saw the film on DVD, and the film quality wasn’t great but not the worst I have ever seen. I’m not sure it is better at the Internet Archive, but viewing it at the archive is free.

The Green Glove was an international coproduction between the United States and France, and many of the supporting actors are British or French. It was filmed on location in southern France and in Monaco. Michael Blake’s story has a starting point in World War II, specifically Operation Dragoon, which was a real-life Allied invasion of France in August 1944. The fictional Blake is a veteran of that operation, and the narrative starts with his experience as a paratrooper landing in France as part of it.

Flashbacks are typical of noir, and the flashback structure of The Green Glove is very noir: It starts in the present (1952) with a little background information about the green glove of St. Elizar, also known as the gauntlet of St. Elizar. The green glove has been returned to the church in the small coastal village of St. Elizar, France, and no one knows how or why, or who is responsible. Then a flashback takes viewers to August 1944, with paratrooper Blake landing in the south of France. Then the narrative jumps forward (but still in the flashback) to Blake’s postwar return to France in 1952. The rest of the story is also told in flashback until it catches up with the introduction of the green glove. At that point, the narrative proceeds from the present, and viewers learn how the green glove found its place again in the church of St. Elizar.

The film starts with a voice-over narrator telling viewers that The Green Glove is the story of Michael Blake. But before Blake makes his first appearance, the narrative starts with Father Goron walking along the seaside cliff of St. Elizar in France. He hears the church bells tolling for the first time since the green glove was stolen during the war. The bells were not to be rung again until the return of the green glove. Father Goron wonders why the bells are ringing and who is ringing them. He rushes to the church to find out.

Father Goron doesn’t find anyone alive in the bell tower, but he does find a man’s dead body, and he does find the green glove in the shrine of the church, where it was originally showcased. The villagers come running at the sound of the bells ringing, and he tells them that he didn’t find anyone alive in the church or in the bell tower. Everyone wonders if the return of the green glove might be a miracle. (I don’t think it’s giving anything away to point out that the return of the glove is not a miracle, as the local priest and the villagers of St. Elizar are starting to believe.)

Then the narrator says that the story really began in August 1944, and this introduces an extended flashback. As part of the invasion of the south coast of France, Michael Blake gets behind enemy lines and finds Paul Rona, who claims to be an artist for news services. Rona is also carrying the green glove, which he admits is a valuable art piece. He is willing to give it to Blake in return for his freedom. Blake refuses and wants to take Rona prisoner. Rona insists that the Germans will attack again at dawn and drive back the Americans. Before Blake can leave with Rona, a bomb blast levels some of the building; he is injured and knocked unconscious, and Rona escapes. Michael Blake is saved by members, including a countess, of the French underground who also find the satchel that Rona had been carrying.

Blake is taken to the countess’s chateau to recover. The countess’s son offers to send a message to the Americans about the German attack that Rona talked about with Blake. But he is killed, and it seems that Rona was lying about the German attack. When the countess learns that her son is dead, she is driven to despair with grief. When Michael recovers enough to leave, the other members of the French underground lead him out of St. Elizar. They also promise to keep the satchel until the war is over and Blake can return for it.

The narrator is essential in helping viewers follow the leap in time that is still part of the flashback and the characters’ movements around France in 1952. He explains that Michael Blake returns to France, to Paris, after the war, because he keeps thinking of the valuable green glove. (I kept thinking why he went to Paris instead of the south of France, but that wasn’t explained in the film. Maybe it was taken for granted at the time that viewers would know the reason. Maybe transatlantic flights always landed in the capital city.) He is followed in Paris: Someone (presumably Paul Rona) has been waiting for his return. He asks a tour guide at the Eiffel Tower to help him evade the man following him, and she does. Michael Blake is successful at getting away.

Later in the evening, Michael goes to a bar for a drink and meets the tour guide, Chris Kenneth, again. Michael and Chris seem to be attracted to each other immediately. They leave the bar together, but a police detective, Inspector Faubert, interrupts them on the street to bring Michael back to his hotel room, where police are investigating the murder of a man lying dead in Michael’s room. It’s the body of the man who was following Michael at the Eiffel Tower earlier in the day. Next to the body is a sketch of Michael. Inspector Faubert wants him to stay in Paris because he is now a person of interest in this murder, and he plans to keep him under surveillance.

What follows is one escapade after another, with Michael and Chris traveling back and forth between Monte Carlo and St. Elizar, trying to stay one step ahead of Paul Rona and his henchmen, and avoiding Inspector Faubert and his police officers. Paul Rona and his men follow Chris and Michael and stop them while they are visiting the chateau where Michael recuperated during the war. Rona wants the green glove and offers to pay Michael’s way out of France now that Michael is a murder suspect. Michael refuses, and Chris is restrained by one of Rona’s henchmen. A fistfight breaks out, and Michael tries to escape, but he falls through some rotten timbers. He and Chris are found by the countess who saved him during the war. She is so stricken with grief still about her son’s death that she barely recognizes Michael. When she sees that Michael has the green glove, she grabs it. The glove is supposed to have healing powers, and grabbing it cures the countess about her delusions: She realizes now that her son is never coming back and that he is really dead.

Chris and Michael leave the countess’s chateau with the green glove. But they are still murder suspects, and Chris’s picture is on the front page of the local paper. They stop at a small French inn because they get caught in a rainstorm, but they have to spend the night because there isn’t another train out of town until the next morning. What follows is more like a romantic comedy, with the husband-and-wife innkeepers believing that Michael and Chris are newlyweds, Michael getting drunk, and Chris not wanting to let Michael anywhere near her. The innkeepers are amused by what they believe is Michael’s and Chris’s hesitancy and trepidation about consummating their marriage, when Chris only wants to defend her honor because she and Michael aren’t married and don’t know yet that they care about one another.

The Green Glove is consistently categorized as a film noir, but I found it had a lot of 1950s-style romance, too. Michael and Chris are attracted to one another, and the sequence when they are forced to spend the night at a small French inn is more like a romantic comedy. Geraldine Brooks plays Chris Kenneth, and she and Glenn Ford have plenty of on-screen chemistry. Their relationship has nothing of the love-hate chemistry that Ford and Rita Hayworth have in Gilda (1946), but that doesn’t mean it’s not a successful pairing. Brooks and Ford are charming, and it’s easy to root for them and the success of their romance.

The Green Glove is a reunion of sorts for Glenn Ford and George Macready. In Gilda, Macready plays the part of Ballin Mundson, who is definitely a Nazi and even more threatening than Paul Rona. Rona denies being a German, that is, on the wrong side of the war, but he is an opportunistic art thief in The Green Glove. He is still unsavory, and he is still a threat to Glenn Ford as Michael Blake.

I wrote about Gilda (1946) in October 2017. Click here for my article.

Comparing The Green Glove and Gilda shows how talented Glenn Ford was: He is believable as the hateful Johnny Farrell in Gilda and equally believable as the gallant Michael Blake in The Green Glove. The Green Glove may be a more romantic film than Gilda, but it’s still a film noir, and a fun one at that. I enjoyed the twists and turns of the postwar intrigue. The film’s resolution that clarified the mystery of the green glove and its reappearance in the church on St. Elizar is satisfying. And a little romance between the two leads doesn’t hurt one bit.

January 31, 1952 (Los Angeles premiere), February 28, 1952, release dates  •  Directed by Rudolph Maté  •  Screenplay by Charles Bennett  •  Based on the novel The Green Glove by Charles Bennett  •  Music by Joseph Kosma  •  Edited by Lola Barache, Louis Sackin  •  Cinematography by Claude Renoir

Glenn Ford as Michael (aka Mike) Blake  •  Geraldine Brooks as Christine (aka Chris) Kenneth  •  Sir Cedric Hardwicke as Father Goron  •  George Macready as Count Paul Rona  •  Gaby André as Gaby Saunders  •  Jany Holt as the countess  •  Roger Tréville as Police Inspector Faubert  •  Geprges Tabet as Jacques Piotet  •  Meg Lemonnier as Madame Piotet  •  Paul Bonifas as the inspector  •  Jean Bretonnière as the singer  •  John Dehner as the narrator

Distributed by United Artists  •  Produced by Benagoss Productions, Union Générale Cinématographique