tomsview Dismissed in Halliwell's Film Guide as "poor work all around", "Laughing Anne" must be more than just bad to explain why it stays in the memory. Despite some admittedly odd touches – it's not totally without merit."Laughing Anne" was based on "Because of the Dollars", a short story by Joseph Conrad, who later reworked it as a play. The plot and the characters underwent considerable reshaping for the 1954 film version. A favourite Conrad device was to have a storyteller recounting a tale he had witnessed, and the film has Conrad, played by Robert Harris, narrating the story.Wendell Corey plays Davidson, the captain of the Susan, a cargo vessel plying the seas around Java in the early 1900's. Never a name that had crowds lining up around the block, Wendell Corey looks pretty world-weary in this outing. Although only 40 at the time, he looks older.When Davidson ends up in a waterfront bar, he attracts the attention of a French singer, Laughing Anne.Margaret Lockwood plays Laughing Anne. She takes her character's name seriously; when first introduced, she throws her head back and delivers a long peal of forced laughter – just so we know she is Laughing Anne. Fortunately, she tones down this effect for the rest of the movie.As Davidson and Anne become acquainted, they are interrupted by Jem Farrell played by Forest Tucker. Farrell, who owns the bar, has lost both hands and protects the stumps with leather coverings. A tricky effect for 1954 – where you would normally expect the loss of hands to make a man's arms shorter, in this film it actually makes them longer. Farrell keeps his arms in his pockets most of the time but this only draws more attention to them.Farrell turns out to be Laughing Anne's boyfriend and he does not take kindly to the attention Davidson is showing her. When Davidson returns to his vessel, Laughing Anne stows away to escape the abusive Farrell. As they head to Singapore, they fall in love.The story of how Laughing Anne became involved with Farrell is told in flashback. Farrell has become dependent on Anne but treats her badly. However, when the Susan reaches Singapore, Anne leaves Davidson to return to Farrell because she knows he will need her.Six years elapse and Davidson has undertaken an assignment to exchange currency at a remote settlement up-river. He meets Laughing Anne again, although still with Farrell she now has a six-year old son who Davidson suspects might be his. Davidson talks her into finally leaving Farrell but before they can, Farrell plots to steal the money that Davidson has on board the Susan. Laughing Anne warns Davidson, and this leads to her death as well as Farrell's.Davidson ends up raising Anne's son even though he realises he is not the father. The final scene in the film when the son lets out the exact same laugh as his mother is pretty weird."Laughing Anne" has many strikes against it but the desperation of the two downbeat leads and Tucker's brooding, handless man give the story a moodiness that many a better-crafted film has struggled to achieve. All things considered, Halliwell's dismissal of it was just a little too cursory.

writers_reign There are Golden Turkeys and Platinum Turkeys and then there is Laughing Anne. I doubt if four leads have ever been more mis-matched in a movie. Wendell 'Mahogany' Corey gets top-billing over Margaret Lockwood whose best days were behind her whilst even more bizarrely Forest Tucker and Ronald Shiner share third and fourth spot. The film has one minor distinction inasmuch as it is the only film based on his work in which Joseph Conrad appears as a character narrating his own story over drinks - the device, albeit much less crudely, had worked well some half a dozen years previously when Herbert Marshall portrayed Somerset Maugham in The Razor's Edge and actually interacted with his own fictional creations throughout as well as providing linking narration. The plot, acting, in fact just about everything in the movie will best be served by the application of a discreet veil. For connoisseurs of seriously bad movies only.

Leslie Howard Adams And it took Herbert Wilcox to get them together in 1954, and Wendell Corey and Forrest Tucker got to take advantage of a loophole in the U.S. tax laws of the time.Based on Conrad's short story of a red-headed beauty of the eighteen-eighties who was a singer in an elegant Parisian night-club, whose laugh gave her the title of "Laughing Anne" (Maragert Lockwood). Her lover, Jen Farrell (Forrest Tucker) wins a fight that should have led to a meeting with heavyweight champion John L. Sullivan but crooks, who had sought to fix the fight, fixed him instead and Farrell is so hurt that Laughing Anne realizes he will never fight again. They drift to the Eastern seas where Anne becomes a singer in sordid Javanese bars.There she meets Captain Davidson (Wendell Corey), the master of a trading schooner, stows away on his ship and begs him to take her to Singapore. In the slow lazy cruise, Davidson falls under the spell of Laughing Anne and begs her to marry him, but she has learned from him an old forgotten sense of loyalty, jumps ship at Singapore and makes her way back to the blowzy, forlorn life with Farrell.Years later, Davidson meets her again when an unusual cargo takes him to a strange lonely, hot-and-steamy jungle settlement; the Woman with the Laugh has sunk in squalor and, although she is still with Farrell, she has a little boy named Davy (Gerald Lohan) with her. Davidson's heart and mind leap back to the rapture of that Archipelago cruise and he tells Annie he will take her and Davy away with him. But Farrell has heard of Davidson's rich cargo and plans to seize it.