10/10
Coping with a hopeless domestic situation of a cripple, frustration, deceit and despair
22 November 2021
Linda Darnell and Dan Duryea make this film by perhaps the best performance of their careers both of them, in a play perfectly suited for them and bringing out the best of both of them, Dan Duryea as a bitter cripple, a former dancer, bringing his bitterness to a burning epitome of pathetic anger and despair, and Linda Darnell, the more beautiful of two sisters, making you wonder why she was left a spinster while her sister Faith Domergue gets stuck with two children with a later incapacitated furiously bitter husband. Of course Linda must take this "gas station Casanova" (Rick Jason) seriously when he deigns to court her, actually to get at her married sister, but as the sensitive and empathic woman she is, she takes it too seriously and realizes her mistake too late. It's a great story of frustrated love and jealousy, human fallacy and passion running amuck because of misapprehensions. To this comes the innocence of the two children, making noise by their mischief but at least pointing out their presence, and Eddie (Hal Baylor) as the clown of the drama, totally naïve and believing his jokes to be funny, while he is the only one laughing at them, which actually makes them funny for their sheer stupidity. The scenery is remarkably and consistently bleak and humdrum, a shabby restaurant and a claustrophobic home, with only some dream sequences for a relief - this is actually a drama on level with Ibsen, Tennessee Williams and others of that category. To this comes Franz Waxman's irresistible music, giving the story and the characters and their bleak world all the beauty that they are missing. It's a wonderful, tense drama which must bring about deep reflections for everybody about their own life meanings and motives.
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