TaryBiggBall It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

Sharkflei Your blood may run cold, but you now find yourself pinioned to the story.

Tayloriona Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Kirandeep Yoder The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

utgard14 Veteran Gordon MacRae is recuperating from wartime injuries in a hospital. His buddy Edmond O'Brien has been visiting him regularly but suddenly the visits stop. On Christmas Eve, Viveca Lindfors shows up to tell MacRae that his friend is hurt. When he's released from the hospital a short time later MacRae tries to figure out what happened to O'Brien, with help from pretty nurse Virginia Mayo.Solid film noir with a good cast and several twists & turns. Great role for MacRae, best known for musicals. His wife Sheila also appears in this. Edmond O'Brien, Viveca Lindfors, and Dane Clark are all good. Virginia Mayo is lovely but it's odd seeing her in black & white. She will always be a Technicolor goddess to me. She's enjoyable in this and has believable chemistry with Gordon MacRae. Ed Begley is terrific as the police captain who's also looking for O'Brien. He gets some great lines such as when he stops another cop from shooting at a fleeing suspect because "you might hit a taxpayer." It's something of a hidden gem among film noir movies. For some reason, it sat on the shelf for about a year and a half before it was released.

madmonkmcghee It's hard to resist making puns about the title, but i will. Instead i will use this space to explain why this is not a Noir movie, but a tepid murder mystery. "Pray tell us, oh Wise One!" Right then, are you sitting comfortably? Then i'll begin. Noir stories are all about moral ambiguity and moral choices. People doing the wrong things knowingly but still they can't help themselves. Or they can, but don't. Does this apply to this movie? Only if the O'Brien character had turned out to have betrayed his army buddy, or the cute nurse to have been in cahoots with the killer. Instead we are supposed to be wondering who the killer is, even if it's blindingly obvious as soon as he's on screen. "Excuse me sir, but why exactly are you in this story? You seem to serve no purpose whatsoever. "Ha! How wrong can you be!" And why didn't they make O'Brien the lead? And why, when so many superior noirs are gathering dust, was this put on DVD? Now that's a crime.

secondtake Backfire (1950)A complicated, interesting and sometimes forced story about two ex-G.I.s with dreams of a ranch. But the realities of post-War America set in, with shades of old gangsterism (this is a Warner Bros. film, remember) and with siren calls from lonely women and a murder unexplained. The story is made more complicated (and interesting) by layering a number of flashbacks into the flow, and you have to really pay attention to keep the chronology straight. But this is a plus, in the end, because it's a richly dense movie you could easily watch a second time. Just the range of scenes is ambitious, from gorgeous pouring rain at night to a boxing arena to a sunny army rehab swimming pool to, of course, a detective's office. The photography (under Carl Guthrie) layers up many scenes, some are visually sensational (he also shot the great "Caged" a few months later).Viveca Lindfors makes some stunning appearances here as Lysa, and you can see why Hollywood thought she might make a new Swedish import like Ingrid Bergman. And she can act, too, with an emotional intensity and range that makes you wonder why her career didn't, in fact, take off. Almost to set her off as the mysterious brooding beauty, the lead woman is the cute, cheerful, all American Virginia Mayo, who plays nurse and friend Julie perfectly. In a way you see in just these two how well cast, and typecast, two women can be, and how the director, Vincent Sherman, works so well with their differences, though we all wish for more of Lindfors.Likewise for the two leading men. The main star is a pretty boy, and a decent actor, Gordon MacRae as Bob, but MacRae lacks presence and magnetism, and maybe true ability. At first we accept this because Bob is just lying in a hospital bed, with Julie cheerfully attending. But then up he gets, pain all gone, and the real movie starts. His best friend is the underrated noir staple Edmond O'Brien, who isn't pretty at all, but trying, I think, to be something of a Bogart, a regular guy named Steve, with guts and depth and reserve. With Lindfors, he's still the best performer here, and they have a few scenes together that are the best acted, if not the best written, parts of the movie. If we take the Bergman/Bogart comparison out of "Casablanca" to an extreme here with Lindfors/O'Brien in "Backfire," we can see their scene by the piano as a kind of wartime flashback, shoehorned into the movie for no good reason except to say they must be fated to meet and fall in love. But this isn't easy when someone else already loves the girl, and that someone has a gun, and a warped mind.Why exactly this doesn't all come together is one of the mysteries of the movies, where there are so many pieces to a puzzle that contribute successively, and concurrently, and getting them perfect is really really hard. Ultimately it's the director we look to for the big decisions (as well as the day to day control), and Sherman had shown once before his mastery of a complex story in "Mr. Skeffington." In a way, this one is just so fractured, following the film noir penchant for flashbacks and femme fatales and confusing plots, it would take a miracle, or a Michael Curtiz, to pull it off (I'm thinking "Mildred Pierce" more than "Casablanca" here). Still, it's a great film to get lost in, and to pull out the subtleties where they really work well.

Robert J. Maxwell The title, "Backfire," adumbrates the quality of the film. It's one of those generic titles that could mean anything. You know the type -- "Another Dawn," "Guns of Darkness," "Whirpool," "Danger Signal," "Fatal Bliss," "Lethal Panties: The True Story of the Victoria's Secret Murders". The movie is a talky, rather dull murder mystery about Gordon MacRae, who's been undergoing surgery for a couple of years in a VA hospital in Los Angeles, trying to clear his buddy, Edmond O'Brien, of a murder charge.It has an interesting cast -- Virginia Mayo, Ed Begley, Dane Clark, Viveca Linfors, and even John Dehner and John Ridgeley in small parts. The latter has only one or two lines. Caramba, he was a Warners stalwart during the war years, and here, with that mustache, he looks like an aged John Dillinger.But this is no film noir, unless we want to invent a new definition for the term. There is no femme fatale, no expressionistic photography, no evocative sets, no atmosphere of resigned despair. What it is, is a B murder mystery. Dump the post-war background, change the casting, and you've got a cheap thriller from the 1930s. Not Charlie Chan, maybe, but Boston Blackie or Dick Tracy.I was able to spot the mysterious villain shortly after he appeared, not because of an excess of ESP but because of the Inviolable Law of Excess Characters. The director keeps the murder's face hidden during his rare appearance so we know immediately that he's someone we've already met. And which character have we met that uses a well-known performer but seems to have nothing much to contribute to the narrative so far? In any case the structure is clumsy. There's a good deal of talk about money in the movie -- did Edmond O'Brien make off with someone's stash? -- but it's all a red herring.The performances are all professional except Viveca Lindfors. She's beautiful in a darkly Scandinavian way but her acting is wincingly stilted. Some ten years later she was to have a few small roles in which age had wrecked her good looks and she was immeasurably better.