11. The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor

By Cameron McCabe

Picked this up at a new/used Toronto bookstore, Re:Reading, while visiting a friend in East Danforth back in early August.  It was our first family trip since the pandemic where we travelled beyond the borders of Quebec, primarily to visit my husband’s sister and nephews who were staying in TO throughout August.  

 I couldn’t believe Re:Reading had a used copy of The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor in decent condition.  Like The Darkmasters Trilogy, The Face was one of the “100 Novels about Cinema” featured in the August 2018 issue of Sight and Sound, where I first heard of this unusual hard-boiled murder mystery.

I only started reading The Face on the train ride back home, alone, gloriously alone, while hubs and kid remained in TO for a few more days.  Even though the book was fairly compact, it took me a while to finish because summer, ie. heat wave, general busy-ness.   And I couldn’t quite finish it before my trip to Vancouver in mid-Sept, and because I only had a couple of chapters left, I didn’t bring it with me.  So that was another two weeks of non-reading.  Then I disliked how the book ended and that took another while to finally get to the end (more on that later).

The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor was, in film terms, very meta.  There were a lot of insider references about working in film, and editing terminology, which I appreciated. 

      I was cutting the last sequences of The Waning Moon when Robertson came in and sat down.  He wanted to ask me something but he did not know how to start his question.  He looked at my scissors and said: ‘I often wonder why you people always cut on the end of a movement instead of cutting right on the movement.’

     I answered and he said something else about cutting and editing. We talked about the montage of the Russian films, about the French avant-garde, about the photography of the early Swedish silent and the sets of the German film classics.  We talked about everything but the thing we wanted to talk about. He did not know how to shift the theme and I did not want to start the shifting.

I would’ve loved this book as a film student, as I'd cut my teeth cutting film on a flatbed and studied the films that the two editors were conversing about.

 At first, I thought the story took place in the States since all the characters spoke in an American dialect.  Even though there were obvious references about prices being in pounds, etc.  It wasn’t until I read about Scotland Yard getting involved did I realize this was actually set in London, England!

The story unfolds via the first-person POV of Cameron McCabe, who’s also the ‘author’ of the book.  McCabe is a supervising film editor at a London movie studio, and his boss wants him to cut out the part of a young, aspiring actress without any real reason.  The problem is that the actress is one of the leads in a film about a love triangle, so this would be a near impossible task, even for a talented editor.  McCabe suspects the actress had jilted the studio boss and this is his way of getting revenge.  Later that day, the actress is found dead in another editor’s cutting room, and what do y’know, the room is equipped with an automatic camera that starts filming the room as soon as the door is opened.  Of course, the reel goes missing and soon, Detective Inspector Smith of Scotland Yard arrives on the scene to investigate the murder.  There is immediate tension between Smith and McCabe.  It doesn’t help that McCabe is a smart-ass with the inspector and our ‘hero’ immediately starts his own investigation on what happened and searches for the missing film reel. The reader eventually learns that McCabe isn’t what he seems, and surprise surprise, he’s far from a reliable narrator.  

The book was very clever, unusual, and even ahead of its time, making use of the ‘false document’ technique and the gimmick of narrator as ‘author’, which turns out to be a confession. 

Unfortunately, the writing wasn’t always great and it really got bogged down by its self-referentialism, especially in the afterword by a side character named Mueller with two dots.  Mueller was a key witness Smith used to prosecute McCabe, and he goes into agonizing detail analyzing the psyche and motivations of McCabe based on his bizarre confession.  It gets all convoluted with what happened to Smith because he had used very unorthodox schemes of getting McCabe arrested, and McCabe successfully defended himself in the drawn-out courtroom section, with Smith leaving his position and eventually taking justice into his own hands.   

The book made quite a splash in 1937 and was praised for its ingenuity, but then languished in obscurity for a couple of decades before it was rediscovered in the 1970’s.  

The most interesting section of the book was actually at the end which featured an interview with the real author, Ernest Borneman - he was the most fascinating thing in the book!  A precocious child and youth, Borneman wrote The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor when he was 19 years old, a few years after arriving in England as a Jewish Socialist refugee fleeing Nazi Germany.  Borneman had managed to deceive German authorities by posing as a Hitler Youth.   

Part of the reason he wrote The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor was to improve his English.  So his youth and ESL helped explain the uneven quality of writing, at least.  Borneman then became a jazz critic and musicologist, eventually collaborating with Norman McLaren, which led him to work with John Grierson when he was head of the NFB, and later with Orson Welles.  Then after a career in filmmaking, he became a sexologist, and a rather controversial one at that.  Apparently, Borneman was as sexual as he was intellectual! 

Here is one paragraph summarizing his career as a sexologist.  Reading about Borneman was definitely more interesting than reading his own fiction!

By now Borneman haunted the Frankfurt railway station at night to jot down slang, the cruder the better, and began to write down children’s sex rhymes, which led in 1968 to his Lexikon der Liebe (Dictionary of Love) in two volumes, launching his last and most controversial career as a sexologist. Borneman began to publish regularly, including two more dictionaries, which culminated in the encyclopedia Sex im Volksmund, with more than a thousand synonyms for penis. Nicknamed “Pornoman Borneman” he swiftly established himself as a sex-expert with columns, radio shows, and countless TV appearances. He was living happily in rural Austria in an old farmhouse with his 10,000 books, and had been married to Eva for fifty years, but was willing to admit he was also a threesome connoisseur who had slept with two or three hundred women. 

Still, I’m glad I read this unusual book, which was considered one of the best crime novels set in the movie industry.  The paperback edition I have isn’t great – as it’s from the 80’s.  I’d have preferred the more tasteful Picador or Green Penguin editions, or even the more lurid versions shown at the bottom.  Used book finders can’t always be choosers!