Cheap Beware My Lovely (Video) (Harry Horner) Price

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Customer Reviews of Beware My Lovely

It Just Doesn't Click
"Beware My Lovely" did not work for this reviewer: A war widow, Ida Lupino, hires Robert Ryan as her new handyman. The audience already knows that RR has murdered another employer in a different town. What could have been a noir classic falls flat. Ryan fails to generate anything resembling fear or danger and Lupino never seriously portrays a stalked woman. There is little use in remonstrating that both leads had more success in other films. Film fans are well aware of that. Silver and Ward's "Film Noir" opines that "by 1952, the noir cycle was going into decline. Many elements previously thought emotionally affecting had become predictable through overuse". Or it may simply be that BL is just not a good movie and certainly not solid noir. The amazon community is encouraged to pass BL by.

The Man filmed
Considering that this film was made by Ida Lupino's production company, with Ida even apparently filling in for director Harry Horner when he was called away for a few days with a sick wife, it's a surprise that she is the least impressive thing about it. As a woman who is visited by handyman Robert Ryan, who reveals he is "ill", in post war 1918, Lupino jumps into fear too easily, plays apology as submission, and her voice tends to become syrupy, as if she studied voice with Joan Crawford. Lupino's bad judgment also applies to the casting since she wanted John Garfield for the Ryan part, which RKO head Howard Hughes nixed because of Garfield's blacklisting from the HUAC. In spite of his strong persona and an attempt to sabotage him from wardrobe with a cardigan and half-tie, Ryan has a touching tenderness and child-like quality, with a private and unexplained fascination with a music box, and an empathy with the children that also visit. Horner even frames Ryan with the children from a high angle. Being set before Freud made an impact in America, we are given no psychological explaination for Ryan's behaviour. He tells us he has memory lapses, and demonstrates paranoia and, obsessive/compulsive traits, but also an awareness of his condition and remorse over any harm that eventuates because of it. The best that Lupino can come up with is "You're insane". Our sympathies therefore are with him rather than her since the antagonism begins with her deceit, so that we can interpret his reaction as justifiable. Although a sexual component is introduced, we wonder if the music box is Ryan's memory of his mother, as the treatment alludes to Lupino as a mother figure by her serving him milk, and by the way he instinctively slips his hand into hers in a moment of confidence. There is also a potentially interesting moment when Ryan wears the coat of Lupino's dead husband, and we wonder whether she will think the man wearing it is her husband returned to her. The material is an adaptation of Mel Dinelli's play The Man, and while the handyman's lapse of memory is clevely utilised for the denouement, I could have done without the symbolic use of Lupino's dog. There is also an odd observation about polishing flloors being women's work and unfit for a man to perform. Horner provides a chase amusingly choreographed like a dance, and Ryan disturbing the surface of a bucket of water to dissolve a memory image.