Great Flamarion
Directed by Anthony MannThe Great Flamarion is a vaudeville marksman whose act depends on absolute control – he fires live rounds around his two stage partners, Al Wallace and Al's wife Connie, with mechanical precision. Flamarion is a cold, solitary man who has built his identity around the suppression of feeling, particularly toward women. When Connie begins paying him deliberate attention, something in that carefully maintained discipline begins to give way.
Connie is not what she appears. She is calculating and restless, bound to the dissolute, unreliable Al in a marriage she wants to escape. She reads Flamarion's vulnerability clearly and exploits it, drawing him into a conspiracy that serves her purposes rather than his. Al's drinking and erratic behavior provide the cover she needs, and Flamarion, blinded by an attachment he cannot name or govern, allows himself to become an instrument in another person's design.
Structured as a retrospective confession narrated by a dying man, the film belongs to a strand of noir preoccupied with men who believe themselves immune to sentiment and are destroyed by precisely that belief. Flamarion's expertise with firearms becomes an ironic counterpoint to his helplessness in human affairs, and the stage setting gives the story an atmosphere of performance and illusion that runs beneath every scene.
