Sorry, this movie sucks

Load of rubbish!!

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

This is a nail-biter! Loretta Young is so good in the lead role of an ordinary housewife faced with her life being destroyed, that she evokes the utmost sympathy for her peril. It may be her finest performance on screen. She starts out as a smiling, contented suburban wife who is looking after her husband who is upstairs in bed with a heart condition. The film throughout uses an interior monologue technique for her. And this is where Loretta Young especially excels, for she has perfectly timed her changes of expression to coincide with the passages of narration, and shows more changes of thought and emotion on her face than most actors or actresses could do in such circumstances. Without her ability to make this convincing and moving, the film would have been a miserable failure. The film was thus a risky venture, but it worked beautifully, and the result was the most desperate tension imaginable. The film was directed by Tay Garnett, who is perhaps best known for directing John Garfield and Lana Turner in the noir classic THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE (1946). After the mid-fifties, Garnett turned to directing for television, including several of the Loretta Young Show episodes. Young's problem in this film evolves dramatically in front of our eyes. Her loving husband, played by Barry Sullivan, has developed a serious mental illness coincidentally with his physical illness. He has developed paranoid fantasies about her carrying on with another man who is a friend of theirs and also their doctor (played by Bruce Cowling). But this has evolved into a potentially violent psychotic state. Until the very last moment, she is blissfully ignorant of his mental condition, which is so far beyond her comprehension. At first she manages to brush aside her husband's accusations of an affair, telling herself he is just under a lot of stress because of his illness. But then he informs her that he has written a long letter to the Los Angeles District Attorney saying that she and the doctor, 'her lover', were conspiring to kill him. Young has innocently posted this fat letter that very day, thinking it was insurance papers of some kind. But when her husband pulls a gun on her and, having locked the door so that she cannot escape from the bedroom, she finally realizes that he really intends to kill her. He struggles to rise from the bed in order to shoot her dead, but before he can pull the trigger, he collapses and dies of a heart attack. She is seized with shock and fear and tries to pull the pistol from his hand, but sets it off and fires a shot into the floor, which is heard outside, but only by a cute little boy on his tricycle playing at being the film cowboy hero Hopalong Cassidy. There are amusing scenes in the film between Young and 'Hoppy', as she calls him (the first credited screen performance, aged 9, by Brad Morrow, credited here as Bradley Mora, his real name). Fortunately the woman next door, who is such an inquisitive neighbour watching all the comings and goings, did not hear the gunshot. Then Young panics and realizes that she and the doctor will be blamed for her husband's death because he claimed they were over-dosing him on his heart medication and plotting to kill him, and they had over-ordered some, as some had been spilled. So she rushes out in a dead sweat to try to persuade the postman to return the letter to her. But he says it is against regulations, although she can go and see the superintendent at the post office if she can get there by 2:30, and he can return the letter to her. Meanwhile, the husband is lying dead at home. Young goes to see the superintendent but he says he can only return the letter if her husband signs a letter requesting it, seeing as he is confined to bed. This poses something of a problem, considering that the husband is not alive anymore, but she cannot tell him that and becomes more and more desperate. She pleads and then demands, and is dismissed by him after he loses his patience entirely. Her dilemma has been made far worse by her husband's aunt coming round and wanting to go upstairs and see him, and a number of other visitors appearing or interfering and delaying her. Young becomes more and more dishevelled and pouring with sweat, running along the streets in the intense summer heat like someone running for her life, which she is. Before our eyes, she turns from a quiet, demure housewife into a desperate, pleading, bullying, insistent vixen fighting for her life. The transformation is so convincing that Young carries us along with her as she disintegrates in front of our eyes and loses all self control. Her outbursts are tempered with interior monologue rebukes to herself telling herself that she must be calm, must be calm. It is all extremely harrowing. The ending is most extraordinary, a touch of genius, but I cannot reveal it. You need strong nerves to watch this desperate tale.

Although this is what I think of as a "small" film, it nevertheless is a neat little thriller.A husband (Barry Sullivan) is suffering from a serious heart condition. His wife (Loretta Young) is doing her best to care for him at home. His doctor is an old family friend who once was interested in Young, himself. The husband is also having a nervous breakdown due to depression, and he begins to think his wife and doctor are intentionally making his condition worse so he will have a heart attack and die and they can run off together. The husband writes a letter to the district attorney, and then decides to kill his wife...but has a fatal heart attack in the process. But the letter is in the mail already. What will the wife do? What will happen to her? Loretta Young is quite good here, though this is past her prime in movies (and not too long before she would begin her popular television program). Sullivan is decent, although I never found him a very compelling actor. The rest of the cast does their job, but don't stand out in any way.One thing I really disliked about the film was how Sullivan met Young in one of the early scenes of the film. It just seemed foolish. On the other hand, I liked that in many ways this was a story about everyday life, not some exotic story. Some call this film noir...I disagree...although it is quite a good flick. Recommended...at least once.

Despite the above summary, I have mixed feelings about this movie. It's annoying in that with a single action or a couple of sentences, the protagonist (Loretta Young) could have resolved the mess she's in. But then you wouldn't have a movie. As for doing dumb things, who is to say what any of us might do if faced with the situation confronting Ms. Young? I agree with reviewers who feel that Barry Sullivan's character makes too abrupt a jump from airman to bed-bound psychotic. (Could be the fault of editing, the script, or director). Would audiences back then have assumed that his mental condition might have been caused by wartime trauma? MGM got away with a couple of suggestive scenes. One involved dialog concerning making love on an empty/full stomach. Hitchcock and his North By Northwest writer liked that one so much they tried to have Eva Marie Saint say it to Cary Grant on the train a few years later. They actually did shoot it that way, but were forced to over-dub a more innocent phrase. (Can't fool lip-readers, however!) Some reviewers suggest that the sick Sullivan may be correct in his assumptions about his wife and their doctor and that the narrator's (Young) version of events --showing their innocence--is unreliable.In that case, the narrator needn't have even mentioned the husband's suspicions.Those reviewers cite the doctor's burning of the incriminating letter as support for that theory. But why should the couple hand the letter over to the law when they could better spend the time upstairs (in the other bedroom) for some afternoon delight?

CAUSE FOR ALARM comes across as a TV programmer type of film that has all the earmarks of something made for television in the '50s--despite the fact that it was a theatrical release. Everything about it looks artificial, including the pristine neighborhood. You expect Ozzie and Harriet to appear any moment.The drama itself is well played by LORETTA YOUNG and her paranoid hubby, BARRY SULLIVAN, who concocts a way to get her accused of killing him with the help of her doctor friend, of whom he is jealous. After his accidental death, every step Young takes is only going to make her look more guilty. Silliest of all is her scene with a by-the-book postman who won't return the letter to her after she chases him across town to catch up with him. The postman is played in his usual goofy manner by IRVING BACON.But to give credit where it's due, Loretta handles the panicky situation with a convincing lack of poise while making all the missteps that almost land her in serious trouble with the law. The contrived ending gives the story a nice twist.No more than a B-film, it owes a great deal to Young for making the impossible situations seem reasonable enough.