Rent Another Man's Poison (1951)

The Escapist Character - Another Man's Poison review by CH

“My name is Bates.” No, despite the remote location, this is not a member of a motel's staff, but hairy-chested Gary Merrill who has arrived one dark night at an oak-lined, big-gated house on the Moors thirty miles from Harrogate. It is owned by Bette Davis (in life then married to Merrill), a retreat in which she dictates detective novels to her pretty secretary (Barbara Murray) who is engaged to Anthony Steel.

Adapted by Val Guest (he of Jigsaw a decade later), the film's cinematographer was Robert Krasker, whose work was guaranteed to silence any creaks in a plot. Another Man's Poison has all the Gothic steam one associates with Bette Davis. What is any film with her but a chance for barbed dialogue? Told that “one sleeps better on one's own”, she replies, “or more often.” There is a thesis, or a self-help book, in “it's a wonder what new clothes do for you, mentally.” When telling Merrill “you've been drinking”, she meets her match with his “to help me think sober.” Is there any more withering remark than “for a man, you have disgracefully long eyelashes”? If her tongue does not kill you, there's always the cocktail bar.

Could all this be metafiction, the stuff of a future novel? After all, it gives little away to note that Merrill is fleeing a crime in which his partner, Bette Davis's husband, has died. And the local vet, played well by a suave and irritating Emlyn Williams, brings to bear on all this some amateur studies in (human) psychology (with emphasis on “the escapist character”), as does the daily help (Edna Morris).

How on earth does a vet fit into this pleasingly tangled scenario? Well, Bette Davis's passions are here most aroused by her horse Fury, and one has not seen anything until her return in jodphurs while, what's more, cracking a whip. It's almost enough to turn a clergyman into a fetishist if he isn't already (a cleric is the one local functionary not to appear on the scene).

There are some curious moments. Why does the vet have a left-hand-drive jeep? And why does he need to borrow a dictionary for some work, “nothing cosmic, just a paper for the Royal Society.” Surely he would have one, unless a patient has eaten it? Still, this allows Bette Davis to say, “it's a new Oxford one” and the vet to reply, “our old friend” (Martin Amis recalls his father patting the Concise Oxford as if it were a pet and saying, “this is the one”).

And by way of an ending, a review can add to the sum of human knowledge. Some of this was filmed on Yorkshire location, at a village near a waterfall known as Janet's Foss. Could that first name have inspired the one given to author Bette Davis in this diverting film whose entrances and exits bring it something of a dark farce?