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The edge of eternity is a tourist attraction, the disturbed wretch is not impressed: "Why should the Falls drag me here at five o'clock in the morning? To show me how big they are and how small I am?" The shell-shocked Korean War vet (Joseph Cotten) busies himself by building models ("occupational therapy") while his wife (Marilyn Monroe) sprawls bare under the bedsheets, she has a lover and a murder plan. Their opposite numbers are the young honeymooners in the neighboring cabin, the cloddish salesman of shredded wheat (Max Showalter) and his inquisitive wife (Jean Peters). A delirious ménage to inflame a stolid craftsman, Henry Hathaway films it as if in a trance after reading Charles Brackett's scenario. The wiggling blonde in the pink dress, crimson lips parted in sneering close-up, "get out the fire hose!" Her scheme goes awry and the wrong corpse turns up, in the blanched screen of a hospital bed she snaps out of narcotized slumber and into wide-eyed terror. "There is no other song," it blares from the record player, is whistled by the doomed paramour and chimed by tower bells. (The Vertigo play of heights and plummets is foreseen in the cuckold's retribution, where Hathaway's interest in location shooting mingles with his most baroque compositions.) A little visual joke early on prepares the shift from one leading lady to the other—the enormous rainbow by the waterfall is followed by the modest one emanating from a lawn sprinkler. Cape Fear takes note of the climax and its marital allegory, "don't let it get out of hand like those Falls out there." Truffaut practically dropped trou for Monroe in his Cahiers review, Rivette gave a more concise assessment ("pure sex and Technicolor"). Cinematography by Joe MacDonald. With Denis O'Dea, Russell Collins, Richard Allan, Don Wilson, Lurene Tuttle, and Will Wright.
--- Fernando F. Croce |