Cheap Deception (Video) (Bette Davis, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains) (Irving Rapper) Price

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Customer Reviews of Deception

Subtle It Ain't
Looks like I'm going to go against quite a few of the other reviewers for this film by not praising it wildly. The story is quite basic. Pianist Bette Davis reunites with former love Paul Henreid, a cellist, hiding from him her love affair with composer and musical genius Claude Rains. Of course, one lie naturally leads to others, until she finds herself backed into a corner trying to save her marriage and her husband's future. All of this is played against a backdrop of unreal sets and dramatically charged classical music. The whole premise is a difficult one to believe, although it is buried beneath lots of bravado acting, interesting dialogue, and sometimes laughable bits of conflict and action. Rains seems to be having a great time as the flamboyant, manipulative composer, biting into the dialogue and exploiting it for all its worth. He overpowers his co-stars, but he and Davis are good together. Henreid attempts to give more of a performance than I have seen in other films, but he never stands a chance with this cast. For me the grand gestures, the grand acting, the grand music, the grand dialogue was ... well ... too grand! Director Irving Rapper needed to get a better handle on the film. It seems a little out of control. It's not a horrible film, but by the end I found myself thinking, "What was that all about?!?!?"

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A delicious little devil!
Claude Rains was one of those unique creatures in Hollywood--a charactor actor who became a star by his obvious talent, fascinating character portrayals and chameleonlike ability. In these respects he was, acting wise, a male Bette Davis, and in this film we are treated to two of the best who know they are good, know the other is good, and are in their element opposite one another. Rains is at his nasty best as scoundrel extraordinaire Alex Hollenius, a world-famous maestro with an ego out of this world. Bette Davis plays Christine Radcliffe, Hollenius' protegee and lover who has spurned him to marry Karel Novak (Paul Henreid), a talented but high-strung violinist who has returned from WW2 traumatized and emotionally fragile. The fun really begins after the marriage, when a cat-and-mouse situation ensues with Christine's desperate but ultimately futile attempts to prevent the cruel, taunting Hollenius from revealing their past affair to an extremely jealous and violence-prone Karel. All this comes to a head in an over-the-top, wildly entertaining scene between Davis and Rains, which only two grand masters of acting such as they could manage to pull off well. Utterly fascinating to watch these two spitfires send verbal sparks flying off one another throughout the film; poor Paul Henreid does the best he can and his performance is quite good in his (for the most part) restrained way, but unfortunately he gets lost in the fireworks between Davis and Rains.

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idiotic
I checked this out of the library on the recommendation of Julian Lloyd Webber (in his "Travels with my Cello"). I didn't expect it to good; I expected it to be good fun, like the equally idiotic but inadvertantly hilarious "Humoresque" (another 1946 movie having to do with the fledgling career of a string player, promoted by a dark, emotionally unstable, woman caught between two lovers). Well, I was disappointed. It's idiotic, all right, but it isn't any fun--or, rather, it wouldn't be except that the cello concerto depicted within was written (in real life) by Erich Korngold, and it's brilliant! Six stars for the music; zero stars for the movie.