Reviews

The very end of the movie, when the cops shoot Van Heflin in the back while he's climbing up a dirt mound without knowing whether he even has a gun, seems very callous towards human life. He's just a suspect at this point.

Other than that, I can't praise the film highly enough - and I'd never heard of it until I read about it on a Top Ten film noir list!

I think far too much has been made of the alleged homosexual undertones supposedly in the film. Others have suggested that Eddie the hood was really Paula's father, but that can't be true, because Fritzie says Eddie used to work for Paula's father. What doesn't make sense is how Fritzie can moralize about Eddie walking out on her years ago, when obviously Fritzie herself walked out on Paula's father to be with Eddie to begin with.

The movie, while stretched out, does come to a stirring climax. However, the casting of the film leaves something to be desired. At the time of the filming, Astor was 41, Lancaster 33, Hodiak 32, and Scott 25. In real age terms, we're asked to believe Astor had baby Scott at 16, then (perhaps at 18, before Scott as a baby knew who Hodiak was), ran off with Hodiak, who would have been 9 years old at the time. It makes no sense unless we suspend disbelief to think that Hodiak is as old as Astor, let alone that Astor and Hodiak would ever have had romantic sparks. It would have made more sense to cast someone older than Hodiak, but that wouldn't seem plausible that a mid-40's man would be as weasely and self centered as Hodiak behaves. Also, we're asked to believe that Scott, playing a nineteen year old despite her worldwise 25 year old real age, would swoon over the oily Hodiak while blithely ignoring the tall, chiseled visage of Lancaster. Hodiak was named "box office poison" in 1948.

But I digress. The truth is, we're always asked to believe all sorts of improbable things when a story is being told, and we go along. And once you go along with this premise, the movie is a tremendous amount of fun. Could it have been made better? Of course, but don't let that keep you from enjoying the film noir parts of it that are excellent.

The movie (and book) presumes that a NYC publishing house likes Youngblood's first novel so much they fly him to NYC, then helicopter him into Manhattan, on Christmas Eve for a 2pm meeting, yet only offer him a $500 advance and balk when he asks for $5000. The helicopter ride cost the company more. In the 1940's, a 1 1/2 room apt on 40th st was about $150. He pays $50 for an attic in Brooklyn Heights. The movie presumes a boy seeing his mother making out with another man will have virtually no reaction. The movie presumes his mom would come to NYC and burst in on him without even knocking on his door. The movie presumes Youngblood would allow one lover to hang around his Nassau villa after inviting a woman he's really interested in to fly down to be with him. Yes, I know we have to have the love triangle where the woman walks in on them, but come on! The movie presumes that after taking being taken advantage of by his first publisher that he remains gullible, guaranteeing $250,000 towards building a shopping center and forming his own publishing house. I mean, I realize we have to build drama, but not self inflicted so much!

There's an ironic scene where James Franciscus tells Suzanne Pleshette not to smoke because it's "not good for you"; they both died from smokiing in real life. Apparently Franciscus was a 4 pack a day smoker, which would almost require him to be smoking while taking a shower and while making love to his wife.

This was the final movie of John Emery, an actor with such an impossible deep and rich voice he made Johnny Carson sound like a eunuch. Emery was only 59, yet suffered with cancer for 18 months. He had been coughing up blood since mid 1963, so he was already probably in the middle stages of the cancer when this was filmed. He had an arm amputated weeks before his death when the cancer spread to his bones.

This was also Mary Astor's final film release. Scandal: Apparently she had made a diary listing all her affairs that her second husband had gotten hold of during a 1935 custody hearing for their daughter. Since she was already 33 when she married her second husband you'd think she'd have been over whoring it up, but evidently not.

I'd never heard of Genevieve Page before, but she is a gorgeous woman, and the movie makes full use of closeups to show her off. She is never more glamorous than with her hair in a coiffed bun as it was in this film. Her looks become more plain with other hair styles. Her French accent hurt her, though, especially when she said "Da whole dom ting!!!"

I've only seen the beginning, but Terry is the smoker and Ruth is the nervous mouse. However, Terry answered the door and answered the questions rapidly when asked by the detective. We are being led to believe that Terry is the 'bad' twin for being so combative while the counter girl was so sweet, so we suspect Ruth is being pressured into silence. However, that seems too obvious, so it's probably the reverse, although I will be very disappointed if it was Terry behind the counter, since she seemed so sweet.

How Ruth could put up with Terry for one minute, let alone for decades, is beyond any normal viewer. A great twist ending would be that the doc thinks he's hospitalized the crazy one and is romancing the sane twin, but it's actually the crazy twin that has managed to get the sane twin institutionalized. Bwaahaha!!

You do wonder if Olivia made this movie to twist the knife in deeper in her own famed rivalry with her sister Joan Fontaine. If not it's a rather brutal coincidence.

I don't blame witnesses for not being sure AFTER finding out that they are twins. We don't expect twins, triplets, or quints when being asked to identify a suspect, so why get mad at us for withdrawing our opinion of "knowing" who is who?

The only reason I didn't give this film a lower rating is that film noir is like pizza - even bad pizza is pretty good. But the story - what a mess. Let's dissect.

Muriel/Mildred met Kingsby's caretaker in a bar in San Bernardino and married him to hide out from her ex-lover Lt. DeGarmot after DeGarmot helped her cover up her murder of her previous employer's wife for unknown reasons.

Mildred/Muriel killed Kingsby's wife after a fight over Lavery. Why? We're not told. Why would Muriel then marry, of all people, Kingsby's caretaker after murdering Kingsby's wife? We're not told.

If the fake telegram saying Kingsby's wife was going to marry Lavery came from Muriel, why would Muriel name her own lover as the next husband, when Lavery would be the first person the cops would go to when questioning Kingsby's wife's death? Dunno.

"Muriel's" body was said to be fished out of the lake. Why wouldn't the cops immediately ID her by her dental or fingerprint records, instead of falsely thinking it was Muriel just because supposedly she and Mrs. Kingsby supposedly swapped clothes before getting in a boat to "fool their husbands", as if men keep track of all their wive's clothes?

The story weakly says "there wasn't much left of her" after 30 days in the water in December.The skin will absorb water and peel away from the underlying tissues in about a week and fish will nibble away at the flesh. But cold water also encourages the formation of adipocere. This is a waxy, soapy substance formed from the fat in the body that partially protects the body against decomposition. Bodies have been retrieved almost completely intact from waters below 45°F after several weeks, and as recognizable skeletons after five years.

Why did Kingsby not recognize when Muriel impersonated his wife on the phone calling, asking for money that the voice was not his wife's? Why would Lt. DeGarmot knock on Muriel's door first when he followed them in order to kill her? Why did Marlow not carry a gun when following Muriel, yet knew SHE had a gun?

I dunno.

I love that Communists are blacklisted, not by Congress but by Hollywood, for agreeing with Leninism, which one of its founding tenets is that capitalist countries must be violently overthrown, then they go out and make a film that proves they ARE Communists.

Within 3:33 the film tries to manipulate our feelings because a pregnant New Mexican wife doesn't want her baby born into "this world". What world? Oh, the world of POVERTY. Her husband has worked in zinc mines for 18 years in New Mexico. They try to make it about the dirty Americans who took over New Mexico. What they don't say is under the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexicans in those annexed areas had the choice of relocating to within Mexico's new boundaries or receiving American citizenship with full civil rights. So, right off the bat, if you don't want to be an American, you didn't have to. Whatever the US did to Mexicans pales in comparison to what they did to each other in the bloody death of the Mexican Civil War which claimed 1.5 million lives.

The husband in this saga drinks every night in the beer parlor, leaving his family alone. If you're not making that much money, it's not helping that you're drinking your earnings away. Obviously the reason he works in the zinc mines is that it's the best paying job around, otherwise he'd work another job. Besides, mining has always been inherently dangerous, even today. The idea of a union strike, which this movie pushes hard for, is shown as neglectful of even the demands of the workers' wives for sanitary plumbing. Then, when one of the workers is willing to break ranks because his family needs to eat, is spit upon by the union boss.

In the movie, it takes the union 7 months to agree to 'allow' hardship workers to seek work in other mines, demonstrating that the union's first priority is itself, rather than allowing workers to go to other mines on their own accord anytime, like the mining companies themselve would. The film also discusses the Taft-Hartley Act, which prohibits wildcat strikes and mass picketing. A court order in the movie prohibited the mass picketing. The film argues that "scabs" will take their jobs if they aren't allowed to picket. It overplays its hand. They win their strike, at which point the narrator says they have won something 'they' can never take away. Well, mining projects close down all the time if they become uneconomic. Mining is not like bottling Coke. Mines have depleting ore bodies, and miners frequently have to move to new mines.

It's hard to know which is more wretched, the script, the acting or the editing, reminiscent of Tommy Wiseau's The Room. But above all, the wretchedness is in the ham-handed depiction of unions as all good. Illinois has lost tens of thousands of jobs to the South because it is not a "right to work" state, it pushes out nonunion companies.