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The dramatic crux is swiftly and bluntly stated ("There's been a shooting. I did it"), the investigation that follows is a droll, relaxed affair. Laryngitis curtails the rise of the chanteuse (Maureen O'Hara), by her side is the New York musician (Melvyn Douglas), the two stumble upon the hopeful from California (Gloria Grahame) fainted on a Tin Pan Alley staircase. "An odd friendship," the gun that goes off behind closed doors was a gift from a hotheaded grunt (Bill Williams). One woman is in jail and the other in a coma, the accused's lawyer (Victor Jory) was once the victim's fiancé. "But our house of love was built on sand," goes the tune, "while it lasted, ah, it was grand..." Nicholas Ray comes alive intermittently during the contradictory flashbacks of Herman J. Mankiewicz's screenplay, in a taste for expressive interiors and a hint of unstable desire streaking the mentor-protégé connection, above all in a lyrical close-up of Grahame by the piano. ("A voice with hormones" describes her dubbed huskiness, after the song she sweetly thanks the accompanist.) The snare of love and art, cf. Walsh's The Man I Love. "Pretend they're marionettes, control them by wires. Then they stop having a life of their own." The police inspector (Jay C. Flippen) is something of a critic, "a little pat" is his verdict of the heroine's testimony, his wife (Mary Philips) is a detective-pulp buff, magnifying glass and all. It ends on a properly unsatisfying note, ambiguity in conformist Hollywood as elusive as a cab on Madison Ave. "I always turn philosophical about this time of night." The writer's brother bats cleanup one year later with All About Eve. With Robert Warwick, Curt Conway, Ann Shoemaker, Virginia Farmer, and Ellen Corby. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |