Teresa Reviews “Love From a Stranger” (1937): Losing the Love Lottery

Fidelity to text: 2 1/2 garottes.
This film has a convoluted history but at heart, it’s the short story Philomel Cottage from 1924. The overall arc remains the same with plenty of name changes and additional characters, scenes, and so forth to expand on a very short story. How our heroine gets the money changes too; from an inheritance to winning the French lottery.

Quality of film on its own: 3 1/2 garottes.
It’s pretty good, even allowing for the terrible quality of the filmstock. The mood swings wildly between comedy and terror, like it does in real life. You’ll get a better appreciation of why Cathy dumped her fiancé (Ronnie Bruce) for Basil Rathbone, er, Gerald. The short story addresses her dilemma but doesn’t demonstrate all the reasons she dumped him, good ones too.

Love From a Stranger has a convoluted history. It started out in life as Philomel Cottage, a short story published in 1924. A couple of years later, Agatha began writing plays and adapted the short story into a play. It’s in her archives (dated 10 March 1932) and called The Stranger. The play was never produced but it didn’t go forgotten. The short story, Philomel Cottage was reprinted in the collection, The Listerdale Collection, where it apparently caught the attention film writer Frank Vesper.

Frank Vesper had his own dramatic life story, including his mysterious death at sea as part of a purported love triangle, but he was a talented writer and actor. As that kind of double threat, he liked writing plays that he could strut his stuff in and Philomel Cottage fit the bill in spades.

Vesper rewrote and expanded Philomel Cottage, turning it into a play called Love From a Stranger. As scriptwriters do, he rewrote as he pleased, adding entire scenes made up of whole cloth. Agatha does still receive some of the writing credits, possibly from reworking aspects of The Stranger into the new production. The play was moderately successful enough to be made into a movie, with Basil Rathbone in the role that Frank Vesper wrote for himself: the dashing new lover with a hidden past. Along the way, names got changed multiple times, adding to the confusion. The film’s script isn’t the stage presentation either, with changes here and there.

But Agatha’s original story remains: a woman who’s barely keeping her head afloat financially, unmarried and few hopes of marrying because of money issues, suddenly comes into money. The fiancé (stated in the film and undeclared in the short story) balks. Apparently, having a wife with money of her own allowing them the wherewithal to marry cuts his balls off. He can’t stand it. Ronnie the fiancé rants and raves about how he’s been slaving away in Sudan for years, waiting to return to his new job where he can finally afford to marry Cathy, but now that she’s hit the lottery, he can’t.

It isn’t just that Cathy won big, thus making him less of a man. It’s that she won at all because — quelle horreur — she played the French lottery. She gambled. How dare she. Now I’ll agree that lotteries are an enormous money sink penalizing people who don’t understand statistics. Nonetheless, someone does win in honestly run lotteries, you have to buy a ticket to have a chance at all of winning, and a dollar spent now and then on a lottery ticket is a cheap slice of hope and dreams.

There’s probably an entire backstory for Ronnie the fiancé about why he loathes gambling and not just because the vast majority of gamblers lose everything. But we don’t learn it. Instead, watching him rant and rave at Cathy, we get a much better appreciation of why she takes up with Basil Rathbone who’s caring and supportive and doesn’t tell her she’s an evil person for winning big in the lottery.

Ronnie the fiancé did make sacrifices for Cathy. He slaved for years in the Sudan under what were probably awful conditions, but again, we are never shown what sacrifices he made. Instead, we watch Cathy cope with her officious boss, her live-in cousin who teaches piano, and their elderly, hypochondriac aunt who also lives with them. Cathy is poor and longs for nice things like fashionable hats. She wants to travel. To have adventures. To live. To do more than exist in a third-floor walk-up that she shares with her cousin and her aunt.

Ronnie can’t get out of his own way enough to understand Cathy’s dreams. He’d be an unpleasant husband, or at least it looks that way. The new possible tenant to that third-floor walk-up, however, is Basil Rathbone. Smooth, suave, sophisticated, a gentleman of the world. Naturally, Cathy falls head over heels and they run off to Paris. She barely knows him at all. If you know your mystery tropes, Cathy, newly rich and still quite naïve, just pinned a target to herself.

Ronnie shows up in Paris along with the cousin and they discover that Cathy married Basil Rathbone. Ronnie is heartbroken, but he doesn’t let that stop him from ranting at Cathy about what a fool she is. Does this make her reconsider her hasty marriage? As if.

That doesn’t make Ronnie wrong. We all know the phrase “marry in haste, repent at leisure.” Sometimes it works, especially if both partners are sane and don’t expect the other to become their magical, be all and end all soul mate who completes them.

In this case, Ronnie is dead right.

Once Cathy and Basil move off to the isolated charming cottage, everyone else disappears from her life. She slowly begins to realize that charming Basil has some odd and unpleasant quirks. Make sure you pay attention to the white scarf he winds about her neck (the reason for the garottes in the rating). The servants let slip things that he’s planning and she knows nothing about. The doctor keeping tabs on Basil’s heart leaves his own copy of a true-crime book that includes a photograph of a notorious bigamist and wife-murderer. The picture looks awfully familiar.

I would be remiss in mentioning that Joan Hickson, the definitive Miss Marple, had one of her earliest film roles in this movie. She plays the dopey serving maid, Emmy. She’s part of Philomel Cottage’s staff along with her uncle, the gardener. It’s decidedly odd to watch her perform in an Agatha Christie role predating Miss Marple by fifty years.

The ending slowly ratchets up the terror as Cathy discovers she’s alone with a murderer. She has to save herself but she’s not G.I. Jane or Wonder Woman. She’s got to manage with her wits. She verbally spars with Basil in the manner of Scheherazade, telling one story after another, stalling for time while trying to escape.

It’s darned good acting and great to watch. The only distraction I had was Cathy’s coiffure. She has the worst hair ever in a movie. It might have been the crappy filmstock but in many of her scenes, especially at the climax, she looked bald. She pulled all her hair out from the stress, I guess.

You could say she gets away with murder. Fully justified, naturally, because it was self-defense. Don’t pass this adaptation up. It’s worth searching for a better, cleaner copy. The studio let it fall out of copyright, so there are plenty of terrible versions out there. If you can get a better copy, you’ll see Cathy’s terror when she realizes exactly what she married.