Despite having Edward G. Robinson, Claire Trevor and Humphrey Bogart and a flashy criminal gang, The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse is anything but another Warner gangster movie. Robinson, playing a psychiatrist, aims to study the mind of criminals and research their patterns of behaviour. The only way the assertive doctor can achieve that insight is to try and commit a crime himself. Underestimating his dark side, when he joins a gang he quickly rises to the top. It’s only then he realises he is missing a chapter on the ultimate crime – murder. Based on a play by Barré Lyndon that was staged first in London and then in Broadway, it was considered hot property and purchased at a high price by Universal before being sold to Warner where William Faulkner’s first draft was rejected on the grounds of being too gloomy. The film was eventually made based on a script by John Huston and John Wexley (a regular Litvak collaborator).
The editor Warren Low who visited the set on the daily basis (an unusual practice) was surprised to see Litvak refuse to shoot close-ups even when the leading actors were delivering some of the key lines that potentially needed the punctuation of a close shot. The actors had to adjust themselves, sometime grudgingly, to a man who intended to tell the story in motion, through the relation between the actors and their space. Yet, Robinson who admired Anatole Litvak’s “zeal and commitment” was in perfect shape and saw this film as a chance to offer cubistic views of his gangster persona – deconstructing and approaching it from unseen angles. Litvak, for his part, was experimenting with the idea of assuming new identities to break through class barriers and unveiling the many layers a man can hide under. He later revisited the link between social status and criminality in The Night of the Generals in which a high ranking Nazi officer is revealed to be a Jack the Ripper character.

Ehsan Khoshbakht