This is a unique film, nothing quite like it on the French Revolution having been seen before or since it was made. The director and cameraman manage to disguise the fact that it is quite a low-budget affair by means of near-fantastical camera work and angles. Even the near-final scene between the 'citizens' and Richard Basehart's maniacal Robespierre seems to be shot with him in close-up, but in front of a back screen of people screaming for his blood. Perhaps this was a way of not having to pay extras for several days of work until Basehart, or the director, or the cinematographer, could get the difficult scene totally under control. Whatever the case, it works beautifully. This is the only true 'costume' noir I can recall, but that French term was neither in existence nor even thought about when Anthony Mann was making this film. Mann went on to a huge career in both spectacles and major Westerns, but directorially he did nothing much better than this. (Any man who can effectively direct the diverse talents of James Stewart, Alec Guinness, Charlton Heston, Sophia Loren and Mario Lanza has much to recommend him!) I saw this when it came out in 1949 and didn't even know what "reign' was, going home to Mom and telling her I'd just seen 'the raygen of terror'. She looked perplexed, so maybe the later title of THE BLACK BOOK was a better choice; it certainly sounds more noirish. Some ill-advised comments have been made here about the two leads, but Robert Cummings, although he excelled in light and sometimes silly comedy, had a solid grounding in excellent dramatic work - between 1942 and 1954 he was also the star of KING'S ROW (yes, he had the starring male role, not Ronald Reagan), Hitchcock's SABOTEUR, then FLESH AND FANTASY, THE LOST MOMENT and SLEEP, MY LOVE, and also as co-star of Hitchcock's DIAL M FOR MURDER, not to mention taking a lovely turn as an angel in a movingly bittersweet and still little-known comedy-drama Western called HEAVEN ONLY KNOWS, where he comes to Earth to escort a little boy's soul back to Heaven, but finds him still alive; the rest of the film's lightness of heart is burdened by the fact that while we get close to the little boy, both we and the angel know he must die; Cummings makes it all work in what can only be termed a near-angelic performance! (Mann also used, more than once, the somewhat similar Dennis O'Keefe, an excellent dramatic lead who was also a phenomenally good farceur - even better than Cummings - when given the opportunity.) Low budget or not, they had to borrow Arlene Dahl from M-G-M for this one, and I'd strongly suggest that anyone who thinks Ms. Dahl could provide only beauty to a good acting cast has obviously never seen her as the two-timing and grasping lead of NO QUESTIONS ASKED or as Rhonda Fleming's psychopathic bad sister in SLIGHTLY SCARLET. A load of top-flight character actors - Arnold Moss, Norman Lloyd, Charles McGraw and Beulah Bondi - take turns at almost stealing the film, but the leads hold onto their characters and do full justice to their best reputations, most especially Basehart (an actor who, despite a near-profound acting versatility, never seemed to quite find his niche in movies, which probably says more about us than it does about him). Anyway, it really deserves a 10 rating, but I must restrict myself to a 9 due to that damned budget, which encourages imagination on the parts of all concerned but still leaves you wishing a more Hitchcockian funding could have been found for the film. But Hitchcock had, earlier on, excelled at making masterpieces on starvation budgets and Mann follows nobly in his footsteps, for this remains a delightfully suspenseful and engrossing outing from beginning to end.
Review of Reign of Terror
