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Not the comedy Forman would mine in Ragtime, but a tragedy at the Gilded Age's junction of puritanism and perversity. "Ah, you sirens of Broadway," namely Evelyn Nesbit (Joan Collins), the nymphet's profile adorning the cover of Collier's and catching the eye of Stanford White (Ray Milland). A streak of delirium informs their clandestine romance, down to the titular playground seat enshrined at the top of the love nest hidden behind a toy shop. (The ingénue's elation provides "the censor's filthy synecdoche," as Beckett would say, in POV shots swaying up and down the CinemaScope frame.) Harry Thaw (Farley Granger) completes the triangle with moneyed mania incubated in the "torture chamber of mother love." The first of Richard Fleischer's true-crime studies, a dance of convention and aberration to crack open upper-crust New York circa 1906. The psychology of "the trial of the century" is negotiated drolly, as befits a Charles Brackett script: "No suggestive answers," insists White of a guessing game before his beloved's remembrance of daddy's cigar, "sometimes he'd let me take a puff and I never choked once." A Renoir parasol or a Winslow Homer beach will lend the widescreen a feint of painterly gentility, and then the DeLuxe color is keyed to tremors of desire and possessiveness—the tasteful blues of a bourgeois boutique give way to a stageful of hoofers clad in green and yellow, the gelid Alps dissolve to a train racing against a burnt-orange sunset. ("The purity of the line" is the ongoing concern in an architect's vision.) Nothing left after the courtroom, nothing but the power to choose how to exploit one's own infamy. "You know, kittens, I think there's a touch of the cat in you." It builds toward an itchy proverb, and ends in synchronicity with Ophüls. Cinematography by Milton Krasner. With Luther Adler, Cornelia Otis Skinner, Glenda Farrell, Frances Fuller, Phillip Reed, Gale Robbins, John Hoyt, Harvey Stephens, and Emile Meyer.
--- Fernando F. Croce |