The Return of Monte Cristo
                               
Director: Henry Levin
Year: 1946
Rating: 6.0
For some reason, a few years back I decided to watch any Dumas adaptation that came my way. Not sure why I decided to exactly, but once you do, you have to follow through. There are a lot of them of course - the Musketeers, Man in the Iron Mask and the Count have been popular through generations of film fans and they are still being made. A number of films about the Count of Monte Cristo have been made just in the past few years. The French seem to have just rediscovered Dumas with films about the Musketeers and Dantes recently. Some things never age. Producer Edward Small in collaboration with Columbia was clearly a fan and used adaptations to promote the career of Louis Hayward. Hayward was in The Man in the Iron Mask (1939), The Son of Monte Cristo (1940) and this film for Small and then later played D'Artagnan in Lady in the Iron Mask (1952). Small never was able to turn Hayward into an A star, but he had a very solid career in lesser budget adventure films. He is better here than I have seen him in other films - charming and resolute.



It basically follows the plot of the original Count of Monte Cristo but a generation later. It begins in 1868 (two years before Dumas died) in Paris - but this was not written by Dumas but by none other than Curt Siodmak (The Wolfman and other Universal horror films). Edmond Dantes (Hayward) has just learned from an elderly friend (Henry Stephenson) that he has inherited the fortune of his uncle the Count of Monte Cristo. It is like a jinx. When they go to Marseille to make it legal, they find that there is another making the same claim - the beautiful Angela (Barbara Britton). And the fix is in. She knows nothing about it but her adopted father (Ray Collins), the head of the police (George Macready) and the judge (Ludwig Donath) are all in on it.



They send Dantes off to Devil's Island to hopefully die, but he and his fellow prisoner (Steven Geray) fake having the plague and escape (the how is neatly skipped over in the film). Back in France, Dantes takes the pages of the first Count and looks for revenge by ruining them. It plays out quite nicely with a series of disguises and clever set-ups. Directed by Henry Levin. The copy I saw this on was pretty fuzzy - seeing this in a pristine copy would help a lot and sadly it wasn't shot in color.