The Vicious Circle

Set in Hungary before war--told in flashback 1916 or so--franz josef blame murder on jew when rich baron wants to buy up their land for oil jewish angle obscured

"The Vicious Circle" is a very good low budget film, though it's obscure and isn't filled with action....so it's a film some might not watch...which is a shame. The story is told as a flashback from one of the court workers. He relays a case he was witnesses to long, long ago in Hungary. It was probably set around 1916 or earlier, as Austro-Hungarian emperor Franz Josef's portrait is on the courtroom wall.

It seems that a local Baron wanted a piece of land, but the homeowners wouldn't sell. He was rich and powerful...they were just poor Jews in a time when they would have been at the bottom of the social rung. Pretty soon it's apparent that the Baron has fixed the case against the men...and the prosecutors are clearly working for him and perjuring themselves. What follows are witnesses after witnesses who have been coached or threatened or paid off to testify against the men. Can these poor Jewish farmers stand a chance?

While I wish the film had focused more on the religious bigotry, it was an extremely well crafted and interesting film about abuse of power. Well worth seeing and very intelligently written.

A Hungarian count discovers there is oil beneath. His land, and those of his neighbors. Most sell out without learning. Five Jewish families refuse. Their heads are accused of the murder of a girl of 14. Defense attorney Conrad Nagel has to battle against testimony in court that is contradictory and perjured, while key witnesses seem to have disappeared.

Ultimately based on a Hungarian play, the performances reflect this; they are very stagey. Also, it is shot almost entirely on one set; the exception is a different set at the beginning and end in which a man who has not spoken in decades is dying, and speaks at last. Frank Ferguson tells the other players he will explain why, and it's onto the story.

Given that the cast includes such practiced film actors as Fritz Kortner, Reinhold Schunzel, Philip Van Zandt, Lyle Talbot, and Edwin Maxwell, their performances are awful. It looks like they. Shot this immediately after the stage show closed and producer-director W. Lee Wilder made no effort to modulate them.

I viewed a British print of this film, titled 'The Woman in Brown' but not otherwise (to my knowledge) different from Stateside prints.

Poor Conrad Nagel! He was a star at MGM in the late silent era. When talkies arrived, Nagel proved to have a richly cultured voice with splendid elocution. Yet his career lost its momentum very quickly in the talkie era. There doesn't seem to be any easy explanation, although I've heard a rumour which I can't verify. Allegedly, Nagel's boss Louis B Mayer was self-conscious about his own Yiddish-inflected voice, and he prevailed on Nagel to give him the Henry Higgins treatment and 'Americanise' Mayer's accent. Afterwards, Mayer supposedly sabotaged Nagel's career so that Nagel would not be able to reveal how he'd helped Mayer. Anyway, by 1948, former matinée idol Conrad Nagel was appearing in rubbish like 'The Vicious Circle'.

At least Nagel is a has-been; the director of this movie is a never-was. The most interesting thing about W. Lee Wilder is that he's the brother of director/screenwriter Billy Wilder, one of the most important figures in film history. Yet W. Lee's films aren't fit to share a double-feature bill with his brother's. W. Lee Wilder's movies are poorly paced, darkly photographed, often so inept that they're enjoyable on a camp-humour level. Because many of W. Lee Wilder's films are low-budget sci-fi, he has a cult following. But even his cultists don't consider him a good director.

'The Vicious Circle' is based on a very bad stage play, and its theatre origins may have been what made this property appealing to the basement-budget Merit studio. Most of the 'action' in this movie occurs on a single set, which is supposed to be a courtroom but looks more like a bad studio mock-up.

Five Jewish peasants (four men and a woman) are framed for murder in a Hungarian village. The film implies that they've been framed because they're Jewish, when in fact they've been framed because they refused to sell their land to a crooked speculator. That's one of the problems with this movie: it seems to feel entitled to some moral gravitas for addressing anti-Semitism, but it only barely tackles that subject.

There are lots and lots of close-ups in this bad movie. Its extremely low budget forces me to conclude that the close-ups are a cost-cutting device: Wilder frames actors as tightly as possible, to avoid revealing that they're on an incompletely-dressed set. The shot-matching and continuity make it obvious that some actors weren't present in all of the camera set-ups in which their characters participate: again, I suspect that the use of tight close-ups was intended to conceal this. Annoyingly, the actors often speak *at* characters out of frame (instead of speaking *to* them) as if they aren't there at all; they probably weren't. The actors seem to be trying very hard to hit their marks, and the camera seldom moves. If the cameraman had missed his sight lines by a couple of inches, I suspect we'd see the edges of the set where the stagehands ran out of furniture.

Nagel plays the defence advocate; of course he's a crusading idealist. Just once, I'd like to see a courtroom drama in which the prosecutor is a crusading idealist, and the defence attorney is a cynic who's only doing it because it's his job. Reinhold Schünzel, in Snidely Whiplash mode, is the evil baron who's willing to kill a few Jews if they stand between him and profits. He does everything except twirl his moustache and chortle "nyaah-aah-aahhh!" Fritz Kortner plays the framed peasant who bears the brunt of the prosecution and the persecution.

One of my favourite character actors is here: the sadly underrated Edwin Maxwell, who is never included in discussions of beloved character actors from Hollywood's golden era. Maxwell was a talented actor, but he was short and not the handsomest of men; he never rose above supporting roles, yet he was often brilliant. Here, at the very end of his career, Maxwell has what ought to be a central role - 'Vicious Circle' is a courtroom drama, and Maxwell plays the magistrate - yet he seems tired and in poor health. Some of the trial sequences appear to have been framed and shot to conceal Maxwell's absence. In his prime, Maxwell had a penchant for twisting his mouth into scornful little knots of contempt: he doesn't do that here, nor anything of much interest. Lyle Talbot sleepwalks through his role. Character actors whose work I've admired elsewhere - Frank Ferguson, Philip van Zandt, the always-welcome Ben Welden - are stranded here with no direction. Michael Mark appears briefly, as a peasant. Mark was one of those character actors with *one* famous role in his CV: the peasant who carried his dead child through the streets in 'Frankenstein'. Mark's face had a very distinctive bone structure, so whenever I see him in any film I remember his 'Frankenstein' role even if he's playing something very different. In 'The Vicious Circle', he plays a character very much like his 'Frankenstein' part, only without the dead child. Here, alas, his character is named Horney: oh, dear.

Two screenwriters whose work I admire - Guy Endore and Noel Langley - adapted this material, but little of their talent is on offer: I suspect that they were hamstrung by the extremely low budget and Wilder's inept direction. I can just barely rate this movie 2 points out of 10. Several of W. Lee Wilder's films are MST3K-fodder, enjoyably bad in their awfulness ... but 'The Vicious Circle' is bad in ways that are painful to contemplate. After 'The Vicious Circle', Conrad Nagel's career continued its steady decline. By the 1970s, TV comedian Steve Allen was using Conrad Nagel's name in the same way that Jackie Gleason used Mae Busch's name in the 1950s: as the butt of jokes built round Nagel's obscurity. A shame, really. Nagel deserved better.

"The Vicious Circle" is a very good low budget film, though it's obscure and isn't filled with action....so it's a film some might not watch...which is a shame. The story is told as a flashback from one of the court workers. He relays a case he was witnesses to long, long ago in Hungary. It was probably set around 1916 or earlier, as Austro-Hungarian emperor Franz Josef's portrait is on the courtroom wall.

It seems that a local Baron wanted a piece of land, but the homeowners wouldn't sell. He was rich and powerful...they were just poor peasants at the bottom of the social rung. Pretty soon it's apparent that the Baron has fixed the case against the men...and the prosecutors are clearly working for him and perjuring themselves. What follows are witnesses after witnesses who have been coached or threatened or paid off to testify against the men. Can these poor farmers stand a chance?

While I wish the film had focused more on the religious bigotry, it was an extremely well crafted and interesting film about abuse of power. Well worth seeing and very intelligently written.

A man lies dying in a cheap boarding house. His strange life story takes the viewer back several decades to a small town in Hungary. There, a ruthless baron, anxious to purchase land on which there are oil deposits, frames a group of unruly tenants for the murder of a missing teenage girl so that he may acquire their land. The authorities are under his thumb and only an idealistic attorney from Budapest can give the accused men a chance at a fair trial. --- The defense lawyer is superbly played by Conrad Nagel, a polished and much admired actor of films, radio, and television. Though not particularly remembered today, he was one the most popular movie stars of the silent and early talkie era. By the late '40's he was finding few film roles, but his decision to appear in this noirish courtroom drama was no mistake. His strong presence and melodious voice gave the part considerable impact, and his performance helps to make this minor film a memorable sleeper. Of course this is a low-budget affair -- short running time and sparse production values with most of the action taking place in the courtroom. But it does sport a fine cast of familiar character actors including the ubiquitous Lyle Talbot and good old Phil van Zandt. The action, though claustrophobic, is well staged and the dark lighting lends the film an eerie, Kafkaesque mood. The director, W. Lee Wilder, older brother of Billy Wilder and somewhat notorious for cheaply done sci-fi films, taps his Middle European background to give authenticity to this, his finest early effort. --- This should be a must-see for any fan of '40's "B" pictures. (At the time of this writing, a pretty decent-looking 61-minute version of this film, entitled Woman in Brown, is available for viewing at archive.org.)