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| A Woman's Secret | |
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| Topic Started: Aug 16 2009, 10:58 PM (58 Views) | |
| panzer the great & terrible | Aug 16 2009, 10:58 PM Post #1 |
Mouth Breather
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I've seen most of the available classics now, so I'm mostly watching the ones with titles so awful that I figured they couldn't be any good, like this, but turns out it's one of Nick Ray's better efforts, and if you don't want to know why I'm telling you anyhow. Actors include Melvyn Douglas, Maureen O'Hara, Gloria Grahame, Victor Jory and Jay C. Flippen, all in top form, as well as a young, miscast feller named Bill Williams, and scads of familiar bit players. This is one of those top of the line B's Dore Schary produced at Metro, and the script is by Herman Mankewicz of Citizen Kane fame. Since it's an MGM show, the technical stuff is perfect, and Ray's direction is playful and sure. It's a comedy disguised as a weepie: the familiar tale of a piano player and a singer who has lost her voice who team up to Pygmalionize Gloria Grahame into a great singer and Broadway star, but she wants to give it up so O'Hara (the voice loser) shoots her, or does she? There are lying flashbacks a la Kane and I mustn't spoil the ending. Directoral touches show a sense of humor in Ray that I never saw before, and it's much more fun than a picture called A Woman's Secret has any right to be. The best-in-show is Grahame. She and Ray were newly married in real life, and he coached her into an awesome performance as a sordid bimbo who suffers from foot-in-mouth disease and always makes the worst possible choices. If you've been involved with show people you'll know that such critters exist, and it's fun to see one on the screen -- not a caricature like Jean Hagen in Singin' In the Rain, but something like the real thing. I TIVOed it off TCM, but will buy it on DVD if those wicked Warners people choose to release it. Maybe it'll come out in one of those fake noir sets. Hope so. Very pleasant 90 minutes: 4 stars out of 5. |
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3:53 PM Nov 26
