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Sometimes the Sirk scalpel is best for the savageries of melodrama, other times Robert Aldrich hammer blows are called for. The heroine is a solitary typist (Joan Crawford) in a Hollywood Boulevard bungalow as entrapping as Palance's mansion in The Big Knife, arenas of mounting hysteria both. A flashback registers the Electra element, Oedipus enters soon after as the courting Army veteran (Cliff Robertson) who triggers "an earthquake on the nervous system." Their first kiss is a drowning beachside interlude, marriage follows and fissures multiply—the younger man's psychosis is traced to a lurid parody of his own May-December romance, wife (Vera Miles) and father (Lorne Greene) caught in fraglante delicto, mutual healing is the ultimate hope. "You're not really the patient. Or are you?" Ross Hunter territory unsettled most richly by Aldrich's perverse camera, placed abnormally low on the kitchen floor or, breathtakingly, inside the bedroom wardrobe's imaginary glass door so that the anguished Robertson seems to push against the lenses themselves. Fear and loneliness in suburbia, eating away at both spinster and doughboy until a crack-up shocks the situation into perspective. ("You're my life," she tells him just a moment before he crushes her hand with a typewriter, after which she consoles him as he bawls remorsefully.) Distorting angles and electrified grimaces pave the road to medical rebirth, the sanitarium has a lovely garden along with Kiss Me Deadly's humid secretary as a nurse. Classical piano and Nate King Cole, "if it ain't a squeak it's a squawk," more like a scream in the night. Sublime truculence, originally mistaken for soapiness but appreciated by Truffaut on Cahiers du Cinéma and subsequently by Altman in That Cold Day in the Park. With Ruth Donnelly, Selmer Jackson, and Shepperd Strudwick. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |