The Glass Cage (1955)

aka The Glass Tomb

Pel Pelham (John Ireland) is a carnival barker as well as a family man. He genuinely loves his job. Well, mostly, it appears, he loves the feeling of divorcing sucker from money in as flamboyant a fashion as he can come up with. Right now, he’s planning on introducing London to the special talents of starvation artist/starving man Henri Sapolio (Eric Pohlmann) and his attempt to break his own record by going seventy days without food while on public display in the titular glass cage.

Pel still needs a bit of capital for this, though, so it’s a lucky break when old showbiz pal turned successful business man Tony Lewis (Sidney James) asks Pel for a favour worth 250 pound. Tony, you see, is about to be married to a nice young upper class lady, but an old lady friend is blackmailing him for money. Pel might just be the right guy to talk said lady friend out of it. As it turns out, the business is money easily earned, for the blackmailer is Rena Maroni (Tonia Bern), an old friend of Pel’s. Even better, she has changed her mind about the blackmail anyway and won’t do anything that could embarrass Tony. She was clearly talked into the attempt by someone, but doesn’t tell Pel who.

We learn soon enough that the blackmail instigator is the carny biz world’s favourite agent, Harry Stanton (Geoffrey Keen), and Harry’s so unhappy about Rena’s change of heart, he murders her while Pel and his carny pals are having a party just a flight of steps down. This is just the start of an affair that’ll cost a good handful of people their lives. Fortunately, once under pressure, Pel turns out to be quite a good hobby detective, particularly paired with one Inspector Lindley (Liam Redmond), a man who clearly has a heart for the less upper-crust inhabitants of the world.

This sixty minute cheapie directed by Montgomery Tully is one of the quota quickies Hammer produced with Robert Lippert, and it is certainly one of the better examples of its kind. Tully’s filmmaking is straightforward and effective, with some moments of very clever staging and a couple of scenes that reach for the intensity of US noirs, though the film never attempts the expressionist visuals of those films.

In tone, however, The Glass Cage is certainly close to what one would call a noir, not quite as cynical as its American brethren could get, perhaps simply because its extra short running time doesn’t leave quite enough space to really dig into the messed-up minds of its villains, nor into the complicated personality of its protagonist Pel. What’s there of these depths is, however, well-realized, and works well with the film’s stranger plot details. And they do get strange, particular in a finale that’s slightly more bizarre and macabre than one would expect, and so far-fetched, Cornel Woolrich would have been proud to be associated with the film, if only he had been involved.

Despite the film’s briefness, it at least manages to draw its characters well enough to suggest actual personality and depth to them. In part, that’s thanks to the script’s effective use of shorthand characters tropes, in part because of a cast that fits into these tropes so nicely, they provide them with actual life (and liveliness) and make them memorable. I was particularly impressed by Ireland’s ability to draw Pel as a guy who is at once shifty and trustworthy; a man working a semi-crooked business and loving it without being crooked where it matters.

The film clearly has a lot of fun with showing as much of the carnival business as its budget provided, at the outset using it as a companionable counterpoint to the darker business of the main plot until both eventually intersect more directly. One can’t help but notice that it’s the – by 50s standards – morally dubious carnival people who do most of the killer catching work here, and that the film’s protagonist is even a bit of a conman who wouldn’t go unpunished in more typical 50s fare, and nod approvingly.