ReaderKenka
Let's be realistic.
Maidexpl
Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast
Portia Hilton
Blistering performances.
Cissy Évelyne
It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.
Robert J. Maxwell
It would have made a typical Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode. It LOOKS like a TV program. The lighting is flat, the production design unimaginative, the dialog functional, and the values are the standards of the 1950s.Not that it's entirely without interest, and it gets better as it develops a bit of steam. Housewife Loretta Young's narration ("It was all like a terrible dream") takes us back to war time when she met her Army Air Force husband, Barry Sullivan, and fell in love with him. (At first sight.) A mutual friend, a Navy officer, Bruce Cowling, watches the romance with disappointment and envy.Then Sullivan is laid up with a heart ailment. Young is kept busy keeping house and tending to him while he's in bed. She loves Sullivan but she really DOES crave a rose-covered cottage and children. The attending physician is their old friend, Cowling, who comes to wonder if Sullivan might benefit from a talk with a shrink. And well he might.Sullivan appears to be suffering from a psychiatric condition that in the older editions of the DSM was known as "paranoid state." (I speak to you now as your psychologist. That will be ten cents.) Paranoid state isn't found in the more recent literature but it's real enough. The victim doesn't run around shouting gibberish about the NSA being after him. He's perfectly normal when circumstances require it. The problem is that he carries around in his head a set of delusions that are out of kilter with reality, but he can connect enough dots to make them sound reasonable. A real story: One clinical psychologist picked up a hitch hiker. They had chatted amiably for more than half an hour before the shrink realized that he was dealing with someone suffering from a paranoid state. The condition is something like an encapsulated brain tumor except that instead of being filled with cancerous tissue, it's puffed up with delusions about enemies plotting against him. Sorry. Got carried away. The condition is at least as beguiling as the movie. In any case, Sullivan grows ever more nasty and later goes berserk, which isn't usually part of the clinical picture.Sullivan, like most of his ilk, has been hiding his delusions away, except that he's keeping a diary of all the evidence he's found of the plot between his wife and his doctor to do away with him for the insurance. "An hour ago they tried again." When Young finally talks him into taking his medicine, he's certain it's something that will do him harm, so he mails a lengthy letter to the District Attorney, names all the names, then he drops dead while trying to kill Young. However the guilty party is not the winsome Loretta Young nor the doctor, and their sinister plot but only the familiar winged chariot of time.The bulk of the movie consists of Young's frantic efforts to retrieve the delusional but incriminating letter from the mailman and the Post Office. It goes without saying that she runs into every obstacle imaginable. There are regulations upon regulations; there's a little kid she almost runs over in her race to the Post Office.Loretta Young gives an emphatic rendition of a woman who is hysterical with fear, sometimes too much. But it's all peacefully resolved when the doctor who has loved her from afar shows up and a previously overlooked postal regulation causes the letter to return. Young will no doubt marry the doctor, and it's all for the good. She'll get that rose-covered cottage -- a dozen of them if she likes -- because next to curing diseases docs are best at raking in shekels. Plus, they're away from home often enough that there aren't many arguments. And children? Why not.
robert-temple-1
This is a nail-biter! Loretta Young is so good in the lead role of an ordinary housewife faced with her life being destroyed, that she evokes the utmost sympathy for her peril. It may be her finest performance on screen. She starts out as a smiling, contented suburban wife who is looking after her husband who is upstairs in bed with a heart condition. The film throughout uses an interior monologue technique for her. And this is where Loretta Young especially excels, for she has perfectly timed her changes of expression to coincide with the passages of narration, and shows more changes of thought and emotion on her face than most actors or actresses could do in such circumstances. Without her ability to make this convincing and moving, the film would have been a miserable failure. The film was thus a risky venture, but it worked beautifully, and the result was the most desperate tension imaginable. The film was directed by Tay Garnett, who is perhaps best known for directing John Garfield and Lana Turner in the noir classic THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE (1946). After the mid-fifties, Garnett turned to directing for television, including several of the Loretta Young Show episodes. Young's problem in this film evolves dramatically in front of our eyes. Her loving husband, played by Barry Sullivan, has developed a serious mental illness coincidentally with his physical illness. He has developed paranoid fantasies about her carrying on with another man who is a friend of theirs and also their doctor (played by Bruce Cowling). But this has evolved into a potentially violent psychotic state. Until the very last moment, she is blissfully ignorant of his mental condition, which is so far beyond her comprehension. At first she manages to brush aside her husband's accusations of an affair, telling herself he is just under a lot of stress because of his illness. But then he informs her that he has written a long letter to the Los Angeles District Attorney saying that she and the doctor, 'her lover', were conspiring to kill him. Young has innocently posted this fat letter that very day, thinking it was insurance papers of some kind. But when her husband pulls a gun on her and, having locked the door so that she cannot escape from the bedroom, she finally realizes that he really intends to kill her. He struggles to rise from the bed in order to shoot her dead, but before he can pull the trigger, he collapses and dies of a heart attack. She is seized with shock and fear and tries to pull the pistol from his hand, but sets it off and fires a shot into the floor, which is heard outside, but only by a cute little boy on his tricycle playing at being the film cowboy hero Hopalong Cassidy. There are amusing scenes in the film between Young and 'Hoppy', as she calls him (the first credited screen performance, aged 9, by Brad Morrow, credited here as Bradley Mora, his real name). Fortunately the woman next door, who is such an inquisitive neighbour watching all the comings and goings, did not hear the gunshot. Then Young panics and realizes that she and the doctor will be blamed for her husband's death because he claimed they were over-dosing him on his heart medication and plotting to kill him, and they had over-ordered some, as some had been spilled. So she rushes out in a dead sweat to try to persuade the postman to return the letter to her. But he says it is against regulations, although she can go and see the superintendent at the post office if she can get there by 2:30, and he can return the letter to her. Meanwhile, the husband is lying dead at home. Young goes to see the superintendent but he says he can only return the letter if her husband signs a letter requesting it, seeing as he is confined to bed. This poses something of a problem, considering that the husband is not alive anymore, but she cannot tell him that and becomes more and more desperate. She pleads and then demands, and is dismissed by him after he loses his patience entirely. Her dilemma has been made far worse by her husband's aunt coming round and wanting to go upstairs and see him, and a number of other visitors appearing or interfering and delaying her. Young becomes more and more dishevelled and pouring with sweat, running along the streets in the intense summer heat like someone running for her life, which she is. Before our eyes, she turns from a quiet, demure housewife into a desperate, pleading, bullying, insistent vixen fighting for her life. The transformation is so convincing that Young carries us along with her as she disintegrates in front of our eyes and loses all self control. Her outbursts are tempered with interior monologue rebukes to herself telling herself that she must be calm, must be calm. It is all extremely harrowing. The ending is most extraordinary, a touch of genius, but I cannot reveal it. You need strong nerves to watch this desperate tale.
sddavis63
In addition to a really good performance from Loretta Young as the increasingly desperate Ellen Jones, I give great credit to director Tay Garnett for the very effective build-up of suspense, which shifts gears partway through the movie but doesn't miss a beat in doing so. As Ellen, Young is playing a woman trying to nurse her gravely ill husband back to health. Unfortunately, George Jones' poor health has led him to become increasingly paranoid, and he's come to the conclusion that Ellen and his doctor are in love and trying to murder him. Ellen tries her best to "put on a happy face" as she deals with her increasingly difficult spouse, and then discovers that a letter she mailed for him was actually directed to the District Attorney, and accused her and the doctor of planning his murder. (As an added complication, George actually dies after the letter is sent.) The movie then shifts from George's paranoia to Ellen's desperation, as, after George dies, she frantically tries to get the letter back before it reaches the DA, but with every more desperate attempt to get the letter she seems to set herself up as more guilty. Where and how will this end?It's a very well done movie, with a lot of little things that gave it a feel of authenticity: the nosy neighbours, and the neighbourhood kid who pretends to be Hopalong Cassidy showing up at Ellen's house looking for cookies. The opening scenes, explaining how George and Ellen met and their mutual relationship with Dr. Graham, went on perhaps a bit too long. Then, at the end, there is an expected twist (because you always expect a surprise twist in a movie like this) but the expected twist wasn't the twist I was expecting, and it provided a somewhat humorous (and perhaps, therefore, slightly out of place) ending to an overall very enjoyable film.
Jem Odewahn
Poor Loretta Young didn't have much luck with husbands in small towns/suburbia in the movies, did she? They were all trying to kill her! Here it's Barry Sullivan, her paranoid war veteran husband, with a heart condition, who wants her dead. He thinks that Loretta's longtime doctor friend Bruce Cowling (playing the bland hero type), in love with her, is conspiring with Loretta to kill him, so he tries to get in first. This sparks a chain of bad events for Young, and director Tay Garnett (best known for noir "The Postman Always Rings Twice") ramps up the suspense nicely in this brief little potboiler. Obviously low budget, Garnett uses this to his advantage in stripping the action bare down to the frantic Young. While it's no classic in the noir cycle, it's worthy of your time.