The Great Flamarion (1945)

The Great Flamarion (1945) is an Anthony Mann flashback and voiceover vaudeville love and murder cheap-shot theatreland lowlife uptight artiste double love triangle scheming woman and cross-continental double-crossing dame pan-American alcohol-related hunt and chase drifter narrative classic sucker falls for a conniving woman film noir, starring Erich von Stroheim, Mary Beth Hughes and Dan Duryea.

The spectacle and it is yo, what a vaudevillian fantasy spectacle, the very film noir of The Great Flamarion (1945) emerges as a bruised and battered artifact of Republic Pictures, a studio widely known for its relentless production of economical diversions that seldom aspired to aesthetic grandeur. 

Yet this film, in all its threadbare ambition, forces its way into the viewer’s consciousness through sheer audacity, as if demanding intellectual attention by the brutal force of its own mediocrity. I find it necessary to state with undisguised severity that the film’s existence is less an artistic offering than a challenge hurled at an audience presumed too complacent to resist.

At its center stands Flamarion himself, embodied by the proudly immovable Erich von Stroheim, whose rigid posture suggests not the discipline of a seasoned performer but the fossilization of a once volcanic artistic temperament. 

Flamarion is a marksman of near mythic precision, a figure who channels his romantic disillusionment into a vaudevillian gun act that becomes both profession and pathology. It is here that the film reveals its cruel thesis, for the apparent mastery of the weapon masks an emotional disarray so cavernous that only catastrophe could hope to fill it.

The film’s narrative machinery is propelled by Connie Wallace, played with incendiary relish by Mary Beth Hughes, who delivers a study in calculated seduction that borders on the metaphysical. Her beauty is treated not as a trait but as an instrument, sharpened and polished to pierce the defenses of any man foolish enough to assume he possesses agency. 

If Flamarion’s precision is depicted as absolute, Connie’s deceit is portrayed as sublime, a phenomenon so natural to her character that moral judgment slides off her like water from lacquered glass.

Her husband Al, performed with pitiful conviction by Dan Duryea, completes the toxic triangle by embodying a drunk whose vices are inseparable from his humiliation. He is a man whose only remaining dignity lies in his ability to perform as Flamarion’s target, a position that literalizes his status as a human object of contempt. In this arrangement the film’s central metaphor is almost too blunt, yet it insists upon itself with such obstinate force that the viewer cannot help surrendering to it.

Predictability suffocates the plot from the outset, and anyone familiar with Scarlet Street (1945) or the not in fact endless but rather parade of Hugo Haas melodramas will recognize the pattern long before the film reveals its secrets, and regarding Scarlet Street (1945) it might even be the case that Dan Duryea is a clue!

Check this out! It's Mary Beth Hughes and Erich von Stroheim doing the old pistol 'n' smokerooney in Anthony Mann's  The Great Flamarion (1945)

This narrative transparency is not a flaw simply tolerated but a condition aggressively asserted, as though the film revels in daring the audience to accuse it of banality. It becomes clear that what matters is not the evolution of events but the grotesque inevitability with which they unfold, an inevitability that mocks the naive notion of suspense.

Even so, director Anthony Mann displays flashes of formal intelligence that betray his B-movie surroundings. The editing maintains a sharp rhythm that refuses to meander, while certain compositions erupt with an unexpected elegance that hints at the master of noir he would soon become.

These aesthetic triumphs are like diamonds embedded in cheap tin, small yet dazzling enough to irritate a viewer who senses the superior film that might have been.

The climax, punctuated by matched push-in zooms, illustrates Mann’s capacity for cinematic articulation, a capacity rendered all the more striking amid the film’s modest production infrastructure. The irony of the conclusion, fully visible from the opening sequence, nonetheless strikes with precision because Mann delivers it with such meticulous timing. 

As I have stated before in exasperated admiration, « Je reconnais que même la fatalité la plus prévisible peut devenir majestueuse lorsque le cinéaste la traite comme un verdict antique ».

Alexander Laszlo’s score underlines these moments with a restraint that borders on the improbable, particularly for a studio that often indulged in musical excess. His compositions do not overwhelm but insinuate themselves, a subtle undercurrent sharpening the emotional brutality of the narrative. 

When the music rises in the final moments, it acquires the quality of a eulogy offered to a man who never understood the terms of his surrender.

The performances carry the film across its roughest terrain, with Hughes asserting herself as a femme fatale of such venomous grace that she nearly elevates the entire project through sheer presence. Her Connie is a study in compulsion, a woman for whom truth is an inconvenience subordinated to the higher priority of self advancement. MB Hughes seizes this role with aggressive conviction, crafting a character whose duplicity is not learned but instinctive.

Dan Duryea, though underutilized, contributes his habitual excellence as a man drowning in his own inadequacies. His portrayal is tinged with such raw vulnerability that one almost forgets his character’s parasitism, at least until Connie weaponizes it against him. His drunkenness avoids caricature and instead becomes a tragic rhythm, a pulse of self destruction that quickens as the plot moves toward execution.

Von Stroheim navigates the role of Flamarion with an austerity that borders on belligerence, as though the very idea of emotional expression had become offensive to him. His stoicism is not the noble variety but something colder, harsher, almost arrogantly detached. One is reminded of his storied past, his tyrannical directing style, and his fall from cinematic grace, all of which haunt his performance like phantoms of vanished authority.

The film’s flashback structure, commonplace within noir tradition, functions here as a double edged device. It provides the illusion of narrative sophistication while simultaneously depriving the audience of any genuine uncertainty regarding outcomes. 

The producer, William Wilder, seems to have believed that imitating the structural gambits of Double Indemnity (1944) could provide an aura of prestige, a belief so naive it borders on comical.

Yet within this predictability resides something curiously engaging, for the film appears to embrace its structural fatalism with a zeal usually reserved for grand tragedies. The vaudeville setting, with its tawdry spectacle and mechanical routines, becomes a metaphor for human behavior that functions according to script rather than desire. Here the viewer senses Mann’s emerging worldview, one shaped by the conviction that people sabotage themselves with chilling reliability.

Connie’s manipulation of Flamarion is presented not as an act of seduction but as a demonstration of her almost academic expertise in human exploitation. She constructs illusions with surgical precision, granting him just enough tenderness to destabilize his defenses while withholding any hint of actual sincerity. When she ultimately abandons him for a younger man, her betrayal feels less like treachery than like the completion of an inevitable theorem.

Flamarion’s subsequent descent is one of the few aspects of the film that achieves genuine emotional resonance, although the emotion is so raw it borders on grotesque. His obsessive pursuit of Connie after her escape is rendered with painful directness, a portrait of wounded masculinity staggering toward annihilation. In these moments the film reaches an uncomfortable truth, for it exposes the humiliating extremes to which desire can drive a person who has mistaken longing for destiny.

Various critics have dismissed the film’s dramatic apparatus as heavy handed, cheap, or ludicrous, an assessment that, while understandable, fails to appreciate the perverse fascination embedded within its excesses. The film’s clumsiness often becomes a strength because it strips away the polished veneer that usually cushions noir narratives from the ugliness they depict. In its bluntness the film refuses to flatter its characters or its audience.

The supporting actors reinforce this abrasive energy, especially in the scenes where vaudeville performers populate the background with their melancholic routines. 

Even the bicycle rider who steals Connie’s affections exudes an air of vacuous handsomeness that perfectly suits her predatory motivations. No character appears capable of transcending their own limitations, a thematic thread Mann would later refine with far greater subtlety.

Von Stroheim’s legacy looms over every scene, both as actor and as the ghost of his former directorial empire. His earlier masterpiece Greed (1924) stands in silent rebuke to the compromised productions he found himself reduced to after the collapse of his professional authority. This narrative of decline mirrors Flamarion’s own trajectory, lending the performance an inadvertent meta dimension that elevates even its weakest moments.

Flamarion’s obsession with mastery, particularly the mastery of the gun, becomes increasingly symbolic as the story progresses. The firearm, ostensibly an instrument of entertainment, transforms into a conduit for erotic implication and psychological torment. Scenes in which Flamarion practices by repeating the same shot with mechanical rigor evoke an image of a man attempting to impose order on desires that constantly threaten to unmake him.

The film’s Mexico City framing device, complete with stock footage and theatrical murder, establishes the parameters of the story with almost brutal efficiency. When Flamarion falls from the rafters, mortally wounded, his confession unfurls not as a plea for absolution but as a final act of tragic compulsion. His narrative becomes the weapon with which he attempts to reclaim dignity.

Duryea’s Al, stumbling through the film’s margins like a doomed specter, punctuates the narrative with moments of pitiable humanity. His jealousy, alcoholism, and emotional decay form the sad counterpoint to Connie’s venomous ambition. When he dies by Flamarion’s bullet during the act, the event is choreographed with such macabre irony that the viewer nearly recoils at the exactitude of its design.

The most masturbatory stroking of a side arm by a woman in all of 1940s cinema with Mary Beth Hughes and Erich von Stroheim in The Great Flamarion (1945)

Connie’s evolution from opportunistic performer to mythic destroyer is the film’s most riveting transformation, and Hughes handles this metamorphosis with unmistakable relish. Her calculated gestures, her feigned tenderness, and her predatory glances acquire a ritualistic quality. She is not merely a femme fatale but the embodiment of the noir universe’s most unforgiving principles.

The tension between Flamarion’s technical mastery and his emotional incompetence is one of the film’s most fascinating contradictions. His inability to recognize deception is almost heroic in its purity, a tragic innocence corrupted by desire. As I have proclaimed elsewhere with deliberate hauteur, « Il n’existe rien de plus vulnérable qu’un homme qui confond la précision mécanique avec la clairvoyance morale ».

The third act suffers from a languid pace that threatens to dissipate the accumulated tension, yet the film ultimately recovers by embracing its own theatrical grimness. Connie’s final demise at Flamarion’s hand is executed with the solemnity of ritual sacrifice, a moment in which artifice and fate collide with grim symmetry. Her death does not redeem him but merely completes the circle of ruin that both have drawn.

Dan Duryea and Mary Beth Hughes waiting for a cue mark in The Great Flamarion (1945)

Connie, no matter what you do, you’re the only dame for me.  You’re a bad habit I can’t cure, even if I wanted to.  

Any guy that wouldn’t fall for you is either a sucker or he’s dead.

The final impression left by The Great Flamarion (1945) is one of contradictory vitality, a low-budget noir that punches far above its weight through sheer conviction. Its flaws are not concealed but flaunted, as if the film dares the viewer to dismiss it while simultaneously demanding to be taken seriously. The experience is both frustrating and fascinating, an encounter with a work that insists upon its own significance by the blunt force of its failures and its triumphs.

Ultimately the film stands as a testament to Mann’s emerging talent, Stroheim’s stubborn charisma, and Hughes’s ferocious embodiment of noir femininity. It is not a masterpiece and makes no logical claim to greatness, yet it exerts a peculiar intellectual gravity that pulls the viewer into its orbit. For those willing to confront its abrasive transparency, the film offers a portrait of human folly rendered with a clarity that borders on cruelty.

Let it roll, let it ride, a riot of sharp shooting film noir fun as advertised as follows:

Great With a Gun!!

QUICK on the trigger! QUICK to kill! 

A CUNNING, RUTHLESS KILLER!  

Dan Duryea in The Great Flamarion (1945)

From the very outset, The Great Flamarion (1945) announces itself as an arty old artefact from an era unconcerned with the suffocating anxieties of contemporary health and safety regulation. One is struck, almost violently, by the sheer irresponsibility of a stage act in which live ammunition appears to menace both performers and audience alike.

Indeed, the modern spectator cannot help but recoil at the spectacle of bullets discharged with theatrical bravado, ricocheting metaphorically if not literally through the air. The notion that an audience would not receive danger money for such proximity to mortal risk seems, in retrospect, an insult piled atop the already precarious thrill.

This reckless indifference to bodily preservation is not merely incidental but foundational to the film’s moral architecture. Violence is normalized, aestheticized, and ritualized, embedding itself into the narrative’s bloodstream with an arrogance that feels almost instructive.

One must speak with equal force about the film’s structural audacity, particularly its reliance upon flashback. I am, by inclination and by cultivated taste, hostile to flashback as a narrative device, yet here resistance collapses under the weight of necessity.

The story of The Great Flamarion (1945) could not exist without its retrogressive unfolding, for suspense is manufactured not through ignorance of outcome but through obsessive curiosity regarding causation. The audience is cruelly compelled to watch inevitability assemble itself piece by piece. What on earth motivated the makers to tell thisd story, such are the great questions of our time, as we look back upon their time, in wonder.

This reverse narration is not a gimmick but a disciplinary mechanism, forcing viewers into a posture of grim attentiveness. One knows the ending, and thus one is denied the narcotic comfort of hope.

What emerges is a cruel pedagogy of desire and consequence, rendered all the more merciless by the audience’s enforced foreknowledge. The film thereby asserts its intellectual dominance, daring the viewer to look away.

The performances, it must be stated with emphatic clarity, are uniformly disciplined and unsentimental. There is no indulgence here, no slackness of craft, no theatrical vanity permitted to bloom unchecked.

At the center stands Erich von Stroheim, whose performance is nothing short of coercive. He commands attention not through warmth or accessibility but through a glacial authority that demands submission.

Von Stroheim’s Flamarion is a man whose identity is annihilated by his profession, a marksman who mistakes precision for moral order. His life is not merely devoted to his act; it is extinguished by it.

Mary Beth Hughes, as Connie Wallace, is the engine of moral corruption, and she plays this role with an almost scholarly understanding of manipulation. Her seductiveness is not sensual but strategic, deployed like a weapon sharpened by contempt.

Dan Duryea’s contribution, as the drunken husband, is a study in controlled degradation. He embodies weakness so thoroughly that it curdles into provocation, daring destruction to arrive.

Together, these characters enact one of cinema’s most ancient and humiliating lessons. Men, when confronted with the illusion of feminine devotion, are capable of surrendering reason, dignity, and survival itself.

The film tells this tale without apology, without mitigation, and without the cowardly hedge of moral neutrality. It insists, aggressively, that this pattern is not aberrant but endemic.

Connie’s declaration of love is not a confession but a thesis statement, one that Flamarion is too intellectually impoverished to interrogate. His resistance, brief and perfunctory, collapses with humiliating speed.

Her lamentations regarding her drunken husband function as rhetorical devices rather than emotional truths. Pity is weaponized, and Flamarion is disarmed by his own delusions of nobility.

One of the film’s most chilling sequences involves Connie’s dream, in which Flamarion kills her husband during the act. This dream is not symbolic but programmatic, a rehearsal masquerading as fantasy.

Flamarion’s failure lies not in violence but in credulity. He mistakes intimacy for sincerity and desire for destiny, errors for which the film exacts a merciless toll.

Anthony Mann’s direction is executed with a precision that borders on cruelty. There is no wasted movement, no ornamental indulgence, only an austere commitment to narrative efficiency.

Mann’s camera observes rather than consoles, exposing the characters as specimens rather than companions. This clinical detachment enhances the film’s moral severity.

The decision to begin the film at its end is an act of narrative aggression. The audience is denied the pleasure of discovery and instead forced into the discomfort of analysis.

When the story opens in Mexico City with gunfire and death, confusion reigns briefly before certainty asserts itself. The inevitability of collapse becomes the film’s central rhythm.

Language itself becomes a site of estrangement, as English is spoken fluently by all except Flamarion. This subtle alienation reinforces his status as an outsider, a man misaligned with his surroundings.

The subsequent revelation of another body, Flamarion’s own, is staged with brutal economy. There is no melodrama, only consequence.

The return to Pennsylvania via flashback is not nostalgic but forensic. The film dissects its own corpse, examining the organs of betrayal with scholarly rigor.

The stage act itself is a perverse metaphor for trust under capitalism. Connie’s body is adorned and endangered, while male egos posture and collapse.

Travel sequences, particularly the train journey from Pittsburgh to San Francisco, function as liminal spaces of moral erosion. It is here that Connie applies decisive pressure.

Her kiss is not romantic but transactional. It marks the precise moment at which Flamarion’s fate is sealed. As Flamarion later intones in voiceover, this was the beginning of the end, a statement delivered with retrospective clarity and present impotence. Fate, once invited, proves punctual.

The triangular dynamic that follows is not complex but inexorable. Connie engineers death with bureaucratic patience, while Flamarion confuses obedience with love.

The plot to kill Duryea’s character during the stage act is presented as an accident, yet its intentionality is transparent. The film refuses to soften this clarity.

What makes The Great Flamarion (1945) compelling is not mystery but moral exposure. Every participant knows enough to be guilty.

Von Stroheim’s screen presence eclipses all others, not through volume but through gravity. He embodies a man crushed by the very discipline he worships.

It is to his credit that sympathy emerges despite his rigidity. The film allows us to understand him without absolving him.

Anthony Mann later described von Stroheim as difficult, a genius, and not much of an actor, statements that coexist without contradiction. Presence, after all, is not performance.

Von Stroheim’s history as a director informs every gesture. He knows precisely how to etch himself into memory. Comparisons to Scarlet Street (1945) are inevitable and instructive. Dan Duryea’s role here refines his embodiment of moral decay.

Mary Beth Hughes stands as a credible counterpart to Joan Bennett, though colder and less romanticized. Her light, indeed, goes out forever.

In my estimation, and I quote myself here with appropriate gravity, « Je dirais que ce film n’existe que pour humilier les illusions morales du spectateur ». This humiliation is not incidental but essential.

The conclusion, returning to Mexico, completes the circuit of betrayal. Connie’s final act of violence seals Flamarion’s doom even as her own life extinguishes.

Strangulation and gunfire coexist as twin expressions of rage and desperation. Love, such as it was, curdles into mutual annihilation.

This is not a story of redemption but of exposure. Every false belief is punished with terminal severity.

I will state again, with equal arrogance and conviction, « Je dirais que The Great Flamarion (1945) est une leçon de cruauté narrative déguisée en divertissement ». To deny this is to misread the film entirely.

The pacing never drags because it cannot afford to. Each moment presses forward with prosecutorial intent. This is cinema as indictment, not entertainment. It demands attention and rewards submission.

For those acquainted only with Anthony Mann’s westerns, this film should function as a rebuke. His versatility is not theoretical but demonstrable.

Ultimately, The Great Flamarion (1945) is not merely worth watching. It is worth enduring, worth confronting, and worth fearing, for it reflects human weakness with unforgiving clarity.

The Great Flamarion (1945)

Directed by Anthony Mann

Genres - Crime, Drama, Mystery-Suspense, Romance, Thriller  |   Sub-Genres - Film Noir  |   Release Date - Mar 30, 1945  |   Run Time - 78 min.  |