Rent The Green Cockatoo (1937)

Finding a Fresh Perch - The Green Cockatoo review by CH

A stranger arrives in town. So begins many a story, and so it is that the opening of The Green Cockatoo (1938), directed by William Menzies, finds young, wide-eyed René Ray on a train from a small town in quest of the excitement that is London - something she is warned off by a burly passenger of a philosophical leaning who vanishes from the scene after holding forth.

It would be easy at this point not to expect much of the following hour. The film comes, however, with not so much a history as a future. The story was created by Graham Greene, who wrote in a journal of going to Denham to see the first tests for his apprentice work: “The excitement of hearing one’s own dialogue on the screen for the first time. Good dialogue it sounded too.” He himself was apparently not responsible for the screenplay, credited to Ted Berkman and Arthur Wimperis - but he also recorded that he tried to remove every trace of Americanisms from the script, and he chronicled another “lunch at Denham with Menzies and Arthur Wimperis. Wimperis one of those faintly arrogant elderly men with the appearance of naval officers whose chaff goes down so well with their mental inferiors who feel complimented at being noticed at all. I found him curiously unbearable. Harrow and hunting in his manner, and nothing in his career to justify his self-confidence. One of those elderly men who take too much care of their bodies.”

One can see in this note the way in which the film is a conjunction of those at the end of their careers and newcomers set on working with film in a different, less stagebound way. As such, the music is by Rosza while Mutz Greenbaum (later Max Greene), from Germany, brings to it quite a few of those Expressionist scenes which herald noir - even if the street which contains the eponymous club is palpably a painted set (in which an amiable policeman’s glance advises a prostitute it would be wise to vacate the lamp-post against which she is leaning).

How does the club fit into all this? Once off the train and at an underground station René Ray had fallen in with a man (Robert Newton) who advises her to lodge at a boarding house with the unlikely name of Hotel Majestic. There is one room left and she takes it, only to find that he returns, not with wanton intent but because he has been knifed by a race-track gang - very Greene - whom he double-crossed when it came to fixing the odds. His dying words ask her to seek out a man to be found at the club.

As she heads there the plot becomes as creaking as any of the noir staircases which occupy a fair part of this hour. She does not realise that the premises’ unlikely song-and-dance man (none other than a, yes, toe-tapping John Mills) is Newton’s brother. Bizarre is her singing about a Smokey Joe with him. (Greene liked to create song lyrics in his work, though this is not one of his.) More than that, complications ensure as the police follow the Majestic’s landlady in assuming that she is the one to have wielded the knife. No need to linger as a butler (Frank Atkinson) somehow fits into all this as a Jeeves in a vest which contrasts with the gang’s wide-lapelled, spivish suits scarcely damaged by brawls which - so often the case - find furniture in a different state from the one in which started.

Any plot can sound risible, and if The Green Cockatoo does not overcome its premises as smoothly as The Third Man would do, there is more than enough here to show the direction in which Greene was heading with other teams of collaborators.

As for Greene’s phrase about men who take too much care of their bodies, there could be a story or more in that - and we must assume that he did not follow the régime advocated by P. G. Wodehouse and E.F. Benson (seek out the latter’s unlikely 1913 manual, the nakedly illustrated Daily Training).