Not to be outdone by Ray Milland, who had galvanized audiences two years earlier with his unprecedented depiction of alcoholism in "The Lost Weekend," Susan Hayward wanted to prove that women could be alcoholics too, and plays one in this melodrama that looks like a film noir but in every other respect is a straight up soap opera.
Hayward's performance isn't exactly subtle, but at least it's subtler than the one she'd give as another alcoholic several years later in "I'll Cry Tomorrow." It's probably not fair to laugh at these old movies and their representations of conditions that we've since learned so much more about, but it's hard not to. And I will give this movie credit for calling alcoholism a disease, something people today can't always even understand about it, and for outright saying that part of Hayward's character's problem is that she's too bored and has nothing to give her life meaning. Servants and services do everything for her; she doesn't even raise her own child. All she does is trail around basking in her husband's shadow. It wouldn't be until about 15 years later that "The Feminine Mystique" would suggest that dutiful housewife was not a role that necessarily every woman aspired to despite our culture's dogged determination to make it so, and here is this movie made immediately after WWII addressing that as a major theme. If anything makes this movie worth seeing now, it's that.
Hayward received the first of five career Oscar nominations for her performance in this, and Dorothy Parker and Frank Cavett were nominated for writing the original story on which the screenplay was based.
Grade: B-
Hayward's performance isn't exactly subtle, but at least it's subtler than the one she'd give as another alcoholic several years later in "I'll Cry Tomorrow." It's probably not fair to laugh at these old movies and their representations of conditions that we've since learned so much more about, but it's hard not to. And I will give this movie credit for calling alcoholism a disease, something people today can't always even understand about it, and for outright saying that part of Hayward's character's problem is that she's too bored and has nothing to give her life meaning. Servants and services do everything for her; she doesn't even raise her own child. All she does is trail around basking in her husband's shadow. It wouldn't be until about 15 years later that "The Feminine Mystique" would suggest that dutiful housewife was not a role that necessarily every woman aspired to despite our culture's dogged determination to make it so, and here is this movie made immediately after WWII addressing that as a major theme. If anything makes this movie worth seeing now, it's that.
Hayward received the first of five career Oscar nominations for her performance in this, and Dorothy Parker and Frank Cavett were nominated for writing the original story on which the screenplay was based.
Grade: B-