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

Framed (1947)

I have often wondered while watching films how anyone could believe a tall, thin platinum blonde with perfect makeup and a perfect wardrobe would be working as a waitress in a drab mining town. How could she afford to wear couture outfits on a waitress’s salary anytime she wasn’t in her work uniform? In Framed, Glenn Ford’s character Mike Lambert asks those very same questions of Paula Craig (played by Janis Carter). The fact that he asks the questions shows that he has some smarts. But he wants to fall in love and be loved, which makes it easier to believe that his character would fall for Paula Craig and her lies. It’s a head-versus-heart situation that can only spell trouble in film called Framed.

And Mike Lambert is in trouble from the start, even before Paula Craig makes an appearance. He is behind the wheel of a runaway transport truck owned by the Tri-City Trucking Company on a curvy hillside road. The brakes (both the brake pedal and the hand brake) don’t work. He can’t get the truck to slow down until he arrives in a town center, where the truck finally crashes to a stop when it hits a pickup truck. The driver of the pickup truck sees the accident and wants money for the damage, but some managers of the trucking company (who just happen to be in town) refuse to pay. Mike Lambert demands the money he is owed for driving the truck and then gives some of it to the pickup truck driver, Jeff Cunningham, thus earning himself a friend.

You can find Framed online. Click here to see it free at the Internet Archive.

Mike Lambert heads to La Paloma Café in the town, which has no name (none is ever given). At the café, Lambert is served bad whiskey, and he meets the waitress, Paula Craig. Police officers, accompanied by one of the Tri-City Trucking Company managers, arrive in the café to question Lambert. Lambert is already in trouble it seems, and it doesn’t help that his driver’s license has expired and that he knows no one: He is new in town and looking for work as a mining engineer. The officers haul him out of the café and is quickly brought before a judge. He pleads guilty to driving recklessly, driving though a stop sign, and driving without a license. But he also protests that he was given a truck that didn’t have working brakes. No one knows him, however, and no one is inclined to believe him. He is fined fifty dollars, but he doesn’t have the money so he will have to stay in custody for ten days. Paula Craig has followed him to the courthouse, and she offers to pay the fine. Paula Craig quits her job at the café that night.

(This article about Framed contains a few spoilers.)

Mike Lambert has been drinking and is passing out at one of the café’s tables. Craig decides to get a hotel room for Lambert and leaves some money in his wallet. Then she goes home to the Park Court Apartments, where she gets dressed for a meeting with Steve Price. Price picks her up in the center of town. It is obvious that this is a routine for them and that they already know each other. Craig tells Price, “I found him,” “him” being Lambert. He is the same height and has the same build as Price. (Or so they say. I don’t think the two actors Glenn Ford and Barry Sullivan look anything alike, but I figured this was more of a plot device.) They arrive at Price’s place, where they talk about a safety deposit box, the keys, and signing a card for access to it. They seem to have a heist on their minds.

Price drives Craig back to their original meeting place and then goes home to his wife, Beth. Beth Price is well aware that her husband keeps odd hours. He says that he never lied to her about who and what he is. She has some regrets about marrying him and about her father getting him a job at the Empire Trust and Savings Bank. She wants to talk about splitting up. Steve makes Beth so angry that she slaps him and walks out instead. This scene doesn’t advance the story much, but it does reveal two surprises: Steve Price is married, and he has an important job and social standing thanks to his wife.

Mike Lambert, on the other hand, wakes up in his cheap hotel room. He’s hungover, not sure where he is or how he got there. He finds the money that Craig put in his wallet and doesn’t remember anything about that either. When he goes downstairs to the lobby, he asks the desk clerk how he got to the hotel, and the clerk talks about “the lady” who brought him in and paid the hotel bill. He also gives Lambert the note that she left with her phone number. It’s obvious that the clerk read the note because he points out the phone booth in the hotel lobby. Everyone in town and especially in La Paloma Café is cynical, and the hotel desk clerk is just one more example.

Lambert stops in the J. B. Smith Assay office to ask about new mines that might be opening and jobs for mining engineers. The man working there, Sandy, tells him to wait for someone who just recently brought in a mining sample for testing. This person turns out to be Jeff Cunningham, the pickup truck driver, and he is very happy to meet him again. The sample that Cunningham brought in has some valuable ore, so Cunningham and Lambert leave to talk business. Cunningham offers Lambert a job that will pay a percentage rather than a salary, and Lambert is happy with the offer. Cunningham leaves to apply for a loan at the Empire Trust and Savings Bank, and he meets with Steve Price, vice president at the bank—another surprise.

When Mike Lambert returns to his hotel room, Paula Craig drops in on him because he never called her. Lambert is packing to leave town and start working at the mine. He tells Craig enough of the particulars that she goes to a public phone to tell Steve Price not to approve a loan for Cunningham. Cunningham is angry about the change, and then he has to tell Mike Lambert that their deal is postponed until he can find another bank to lend him the money.

Paula Craig is just getting started telling her lies to Mike Lambert. What’s so amazing about them is that some of them are so plausible. The story is mostly Lambert’s, and so it is easy to identify with him and his point of view. The first time I saw the film, I believed one or two of Craig’s lies before she was exposed. Her lies are part of the long list of plot twists and turns that makes the story interesting and entertaining.

One thing that Framed doesn’t have is the same on-screen chemistry between Glenn Ford and Janis Carter as there is between Ford and Rita Hayworth in Gilda, which was released the previous year. This isn’t really a drawback, especially if you are fan of Glenn Ford, as I am. It didn’t make Ford’s character Mike Lambert seem less likely to fall for Paula Craig, but it also didn’t give the film the same romantic intensity that Gilda had. Paula Craig was simply a femme fatale through and through, with no husband like Gilda’s in the background to play sinister jealous games.

Glenn Ford is one of my favorite film noir stars, and he is so good at portraying the upstanding guy who falls in with the wrong people, as he does in Framed. Ford is definitely the star of the film—and I am not saying this just because he is one of my favorites. He gets top billing on the title card, over the title of the film. He is the reason to see Framed. His character Mike Lambert is smart enough to ask questions like the ones I mentioned and more, but Paula Craig is the femme fatale who is desperate enough to get what she wants. And Mike Lambert almost makes the perfect dupe for her and her boyfriend’s plans.

May 25, 1947, release date  •  Directed by Richard Wallace  •  Screenplay by Ben Maddow  •  Based on a story by John Patrick  •  Music by Marlin Skiles  •  Edited by Richard Fantl  •  Cinematography by Burnett Guffey

Glenn Ford as Mike Lambert  •  Janis Carter as Paula Craig  •  Barry Sullivan as Steve Price  •  Edgar Buchanan as Jeff Cunningham  •  Karen Morley as Beth Price  •  Barbara Woodell as Jane Woodworth  •  Jim Bannon as Jack Woodworth  •  Paul E. Burns as Sandy, the assayer  •  Art Smith as the hotel desk clerk

Distributed by Columbia Pictures  •  Produced by Columbia Pictures