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The damaged babe on the 8th floor, "a gal with a lot of variations." A New York hotel with a Western-themed nightclub (Round-Up Room), the chanteuse (Anne Bancroft) has just broken up with the airline flyer (Richard Widmark). (His lack of commitment is the reason, pondered at the lounge counter: "Get married, become a statistic." "Yeah. Stay single and wind up talking to bartenders.") The rebound girl is seen in the room across the courtyard, the blank blonde with a babysitting gig and on the edge of psychosis, Marilyn Monroe in a serrated portrait of haunted melancholia. "Be neighborly. Ask me in." A modest drama tinged with noir pain and pockets of expressive drabness, sensitive to a wordless exchange of head shake and shoulder shrug between strangers and to the muffled traffic sounds that emerge when the cheery radio's turned off. The gal is fresh out of the mental institution, her uncle (Elisha Cook Jr.) operates the elevator nervously. She helps herself to her client's negligee and earrings and perfume, in her mind the half-hearted horndog with a whiskey bottle at the door is the beau who crashed at sea during the war. "I was just daydreaming..." Suddenly the tyke she's supposed to be watching over (Donna Corcoran) feels like an intruder in the reunion, the babysitter is one step away from pushing her out the window. Roy Ward Baker has all of this with an understated British eye and some sharp intercutting between characters, quietly fascinated by the air of lingering trauma in the pin-up who's "silk on one side, sandpaper on the other." The beneficiary is Polanski's Repulsion. With Jeanne Cagney, Lurene Tuttle, Jim Backus, Verna Felton, Willis Bouchey, and Don Beddoe. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |