Charles Laughton (left) stars as Inspector Maigret and Franchot Tone is the manic-depressive murderer in the 1949 brightly-lit film noir The Man on the Eiffel Tower, directed by and also featuring a visually challenged Burgess Meredith.

Two films recently popped up on Amazon Prime that immediately caught my attention because both were directed by men better known for their acting – the 1959 Gangster Story, starring and directed by Walter Matthau, and the 1949 The Man On the Eiffel Tower, directed by Burgess Meredith, who also has a role as a bespectacled knife sharpener/thief who cannot see without his specs, which is reminiscent of the role he would play 10 years later in the eighth episode of a strange new series called The Twilight Zone  – the apocalyptic “Time Enough At Last” episode where his bookworm character is the last man on earth, finally content to be left alone and surrounded by books, until he accidentally smashes his glasses.

In pop culture Meredith is best known first for playing The Penguin in the 1960’s Batman TV series, and then, in the next decade as boxing trainer Mickey Goldmill in the Rocky film series. But that does not do this virtuostic actor justice. He had an amazing career.
Today we mostly know Matthau for his many comedy roles, but he began his career in dramas as the bad guy.

Matthau made his screen debut only four years before directing Gangster Story, as the bullwhip-brandishing heavy in the Burt Lancaster vehicle The Kentuckian (Lancaster also directed the movie, one of two he helmed). He followed that up the same year as another miscreant in The Indian Fighter opposite Kirk Douglas. He played relatively normal roles in his next few films, which included the great and always current 1957 A Face In the Crowd. The next year he returned as the villain Maxie “The Pig” Fields in the Elvis Presley vehicle King Creole.

It’s under his own direction in Gangster Story that you get a feeling for the dissheveled lovable goofball that Matthau later came to personify, especially under the direction of Billy Wilder in movies such The Fortune Cookie (1966) and The Front Page (1974).

He’s so good at putting people at ease in this movie, you soon forget he is a ruthless cop killer who has no compunction clubbing a stranger if it moves his own story forward in the right direction.
The movie kicks off with a groovy lounge jazz song sung by Ted Sanford and called “The Itch for Scratch.”
“There was a time in Frisco
Or was it LA?
Well, anyhow, I needed money
In a real bad way
So I robbed a bank and I was cunning
Five years ago and I haven’t stopped running
And all because I got the itch for scratch.”

Matthau is Jack Martin in Gangster Story, and “The Itch for Scratch” seems to be the story of his life. He is a criminal who escapes from the law during extradition proceedings and kills two cops in the process. 
It’s a compact (67 minute) budget noir ($75,000), made with a five-man, nonunion crew) that relies heavily on Matthau’s personality to carry it along. It also foreshadows Matthau’s 1973 title role in Don Siegel’s neo-noir Charley Varrick.

Low on funds, Martin pulls off an audacious bank robbery with help from the local police, and soon finds he made a mistake by muscling in on mob boss Earl Dawson’s territory.

To hide from the gangsters on his tail, Martin ducks into a building, not knowing that it is a public library, only learning that when he goes to the front desk and asks the woman attending it for a light for his cigarette. That woman is Carol the Librarian, played by Matthau’s brand-new wife Carol Grace, formerly known as Carolyn Saroyan when she was married to writer William Saroyan, who she married and divorced twice between 1943 and 1952.

Her character owns an orange grove, and she invites Martin to come and work for her.

Carol Grace was a friend of Truman Capote’s and is supposedly one of his several inspirations for the free-spirited Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

Here’s the first example we get of how Jack Martin operates. He’s on the lam after killing two cops, and he’s still got a handcuff on one arm. He rents a hotel room, and when we first see him in the room, he’s perched on the corner of a couch, one foot resting on the couch arm. He’s talking to someone offscreen, while doing so grabbing a hammer from what we learn is the off-screenperson’s tool box.

The other person is a thick-accented plumber, sounding like he just stepped out of Yiddish theater, and he’s been called to fix a toilet. The problem, he discovers, is that someone tried to flush a phone book.
Who would do such a thing? Martin asks rhetorically, prompting the plumber to walk to where he can put his bug-eyed face right in front of Martin’s for a closeup, and say, “There’s so many screwy people in the world, see.”

“Oh yeah. Yeah, I guess there are,” Martin responds in the patented Matthau drawl.

It isn’t until the plumber leaves that you realize the whole thing has been a ploy to break off the handcuff still on one wrist. He’s the screwy one who flushed the phone book. 

Later he pulls off a ridiculous bank robbery with the same sort of screwy savvy. He even purposely involves the police to assist him with the robbery. It might be the most ridiculous bank robbery ever conceived and set to film. It’s entirely based on Martin’s charisma.

The bank robbery has Martin calling police headquarters pretending to be a movie producer about to start rehearsals the next day for a movie bout a bank robbery, and could three officers be stationed outside the bank at a certain time.

Before he slips into the bank, Martin talks to the three cops, but you have to wonder if they haven’t seen his distinctive mug somewhere, perhaps as the escaped cop killer?

Yeah, best not to think of such things when watching this flimsy movie. 

The cops on the case are two uniformed men who appear to work in a closet and have multiple roles – local police, FBI. They’re all the same unit when you have a budget this small.

Local mob boss is pissed he didn’t get a cut of the audacious bank robbery. He orders his minions to go out and find the guy.
They find him at a harness race track. A chase ensues. Into the sea of 1950s car/boats in the parking lot. Martin stops one guy pulling out in his 1957 Chevy convertible, tells him his tire’s flat, then slugs him when he gets out and steals the car.
The bad guys follow in what looks like a bulky and bulbous landyacht holdover from the 1940s.
He eventually joins up with the mobsters to pull off robberies, one of which is at a golf club where a major bookie operation keeps its dough (like for a young Vic Tayback as a security guard at the golf club). The robbery ends up with a shootout with cops that only Martin and the mob boss’s right hand man survive. 

The movie ends with Martin and Carol escaping to Mexico, but first Martin has to make a stop and deal with the double-crossing mob boss. It doesn’t end well for any of them.

The second actor-directed offering is the 1949 The Man on the Eiffel Tower, which was the first Hollywood color film shot in Paris. 

It was filmed in the short-lived Ansco Color process (1950-57). I don’t know if this is a bad print or if Ansco Color does not hold up to time, but bright shots seem faded in parts and dark colors blend in with each other. 

However, I bet upon release it was a dazzlingly-colored film, which is why the City of Paris is listed among the cast of characters.

The movie is based on Georges Simenon’s 1931 novel A Battle of Nerves, featuring his ingenious detective, Inspector Jules Maigret, here played by the inimitable Charles Laughton.

This film noir features Franchot Tone as a troubled and hyperactive killer who believes himself smarter than everyone else – a stable genius, if you will. Tone was also a producer of the film, and he seems to have genuinely enjoyed the role, throwing himself completely into the madness of his manic depressive character who believes he has the upper hand as he leads Maigret on.

Irving Allen was Tone’s co-producer, and I’ve read that he was also supposed to direct the film, but after a few days of shooting, Laughton said he would quit the film under Allen’s direction, and Burgess Meredith took over. It is also believed that Laughton took over directing in the scenes that featured Meredith, which is where Laughton got the itch to direct a film himself, which he did in 1955 with the beautiful The Night of the Hunter.

Laughton seems to be at his most restrained in his role as Maigret, playing opposite the egomaniacal killer who constantly berates Maigret’s intelligence. Maigret’s detecting style reminds me of Peter Falk’s Columbo, who often pretended not to be as smart as his opponents.

And I don’t think I’ve ever seen an actor relish a role as much as Franchot Tone seems to enjoy being the manic-depressive, stable genius bad guy.

There are some great scenes of Paris in this murder mystery, including a rooftop chase and the final chase as Tone’s killer clambers up and down the side of the Eiffel Tower, chased by Meredith’s character, Maigret and several other police officers.

It’s got a great score by guest RKO composer Michel Michelet. There’s also a very exciting musical scene when Tone’s character invites Maigret and the cop assigned to tail him out for a night of drinking in various locations. In one of them a restaurant string band walks through the restaurant playing a fast and furious tune while Tone’s character pontificates.

It’s a fun movie that would be even better if color corrected.