It's unfortunate that the handsome but bland Richard Alfieri as artist Michael Durant to come up against veteran actresses Ruth Roman (as his beautiful sophisticated mother), Mercedes McCambridge and Gale Sondergaard, playing pivotal parts in his desperation to deal with a series of realistic nightmares that have him wondering how truth and fantasy are so closely related. Psychic Sondergaard listens carefully and questions cautiously, finally coming up with possibilities that totally shakes up his world. McCambridge, as his agent, isn't much involved in the plot other than to shatter his dreams of becoming more successful. Beautiful Nathalie Nell plays his love interest, spooked away by his seeming neurosis, getting worse and worse after she moves in with him.
A weird gothic thriller isn't aided by the TV movie like plot (up there with all of those campy supernatural thrillers of the 1970's), but the presence of the three veteran actresses (two Oscar winners) does add a feeling of curiosity to the film, with Sondergaard (in her last film appearance) standing out, still as regal as she was back in her 1936 film debut. Roman, much more than just an Ava Gardner lookalike, has great presence, making the most of the scene where she reveals a truth about her pregnancy. Unfortunately, Alfieri never gets to be much more than mearly efficient, even when playing the lookalike in his dreams. Or are they dreams? The weird wrap up of the film is quite perplexing and left me with more questions than answers, even though I figured out what was supposed to have occurred, which was rather depressing. The presence of the nasty cat in the beginning seemed to be a reference to Sondergaard's black cat like image in all those 1940's comic melodramas, and simply got dropped after that opening.
A weird gothic thriller isn't aided by the TV movie like plot (up there with all of those campy supernatural thrillers of the 1970's), but the presence of the three veteran actresses (two Oscar winners) does add a feeling of curiosity to the film, with Sondergaard (in her last film appearance) standing out, still as regal as she was back in her 1936 film debut. Roman, much more than just an Ava Gardner lookalike, has great presence, making the most of the scene where she reveals a truth about her pregnancy. Unfortunately, Alfieri never gets to be much more than mearly efficient, even when playing the lookalike in his dreams. Or are they dreams? The weird wrap up of the film is quite perplexing and left me with more questions than answers, even though I figured out what was supposed to have occurred, which was rather depressing. The presence of the nasty cat in the beginning seemed to be a reference to Sondergaard's black cat like image in all those 1940's comic melodramas, and simply got dropped after that opening.