By John Yemen, Lost Dominion Screening Collective.

For January’s Canadian Cult Revue double feature, we had planned to play Robert Lepage’s Le Confessional, a dose of Alfred Hitchcock with a big, multi-layered mystery thrown in for good measure. Until we found out, in December, there was no longer a print available for play in Ontario.

This is a relatively common occurrence within Canada’s industry as films are rarely played on the big screen after their original runs, and rather than continue to pay storage costs for prints that will likely never get played again, distributors find it easier and cheaper to donate their prints to government collections, universities or film festivals (usually with the added motivation of a tax-write-off).

Forced to scramble and find a replacement to pair with Whispering City/La Forteresse January 19 at the Mayfair Theatre, we eventually settled on David Cronenberg’s Scanners. This will be the second Cronenberg feature in our series, the first being the director’s science fiction film eXistenZ.

Scanners.

Scanners, shot mostly in Montreal in 1981, has many of the same influences, including the detective genre.  It involves all the classic elements of Cronenberg’s oeuvre  – mystery, psychological horror and gory special effects – combining to create a sense of general overall creepiness that’s difficult to define and easy to experience. It’s a film that will make you happy that no scientists have figured a way to give people the power of telekinesis.

It is a treat to open the double feature with 1947’s Whispering City. We’re not sure of when the last time it played in Canada -  we suspect a long time ago – so this is a rare opportunity to see a largely-overlooked film that is one of the few Canadian crime dramas dating from the original era of film noir.

It was produced by Quebec producer Paul L’Anglais (a great French-Canadian name if there ever were one) through his company Québec Productions. He leveraged an adapted Hollywood script and an international cast and crew to create different versions of the film in French and English. L’Anglais had a short, but important, career in Quebec’s post-war film industry and was later made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1971 for his service to Canadian communications.  He’s largely remembered for smaller French-language productions, but Whispering City/La Forteresse stands as one of his great accomplishments.

The film was directed by Russian-born Fédor Ozep, a couple of years before his death at 54. It stars Hungarian-American actor Paul Lukas, who had formerly won a best actor Oscar for 1943’s Watch on the Rhine, notably winning over Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca as well as other Hollywood luminaries like Gary Cooper, Walter Pidgeon and Mickey Rooney.  Lukas went on to star in 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea with Kirk Douglas.

His co-stars in Whispering City are the appealing American actress Mary Anderson, known for supporting roles in Gone With The Wind and Lifeboat, and the Austrian-born actor Helmut Dantine who had roles in Casablanca and Mrs. Miniver. The rest of the cast was largely Quebecois, some of whom played the same roles in each version of the film.

The film is by no means a classic of the film-noir genre, where the bar is set pretty high. But it is entertaining, perhaps more-so for Canadian audiences as so few Canadian fictional features from that era exist in any language.

The sheer accomplishment of getting this film made cannot be understated.  The Canadian Film Encyclopedia credits it as a forerunner of the “Hollywood North” tax-shelter productions of the 1970s that imported American cast and crews to create films in a Canadian setting.  This is true to a certain extent, but more interesting is that it is an experiment with an inclusive model of Canadian filmmaking that encompasses both official languages, and one that theoretically could provide greater access to both domestic and international film markets.

Given that French-language films often do very well in Quebec and not particularly well outside the province, and English-language films struggle for any sort of domestic market-share anywhere in Canada, this production model deserves another look.

It’s a bedrock fact of North American film distribution that a large proportion of English-Canadian and American audiences refuse to watch subtitled or dubbed films. If more Quebec directors shot their films in both official languages, it would extend their audience-reach both across Canada and into the United States. Similarly, English-Canadian films with French-language versions would have greater reach into Quebec.

This dual-language model would take advantage of economies of scale by using the same camera set-ups to create two films, each tailored to a particular audience. Perhaps it is because Whispering City (in English) was not as big a success as La Forteresse (in French) that the model didn’t catch on. Perhaps the cult revival of this film will inspire some future bilingual experiments in Canadian filmmaking.  It was a daring try for the time, and we certainly could benefit from more attempts like it today.