Beware, My Lovely

Mel Dinelli , whose contributions to the movies include the intelligent scripts to the minor classics "The Window " and "The Spiral Staircase" wrote a play called "The Man " which ran on Broadway and provided the source material for this entertaining minor thriller . Ida Lupino plays a widow in small town middle America ,shortly after World War one ,who gives a job as house cleaner to a vagrant ,played by Robert Ryan ,unaware that he is a psychopath ,with a tendency to memory lapses ,and a history of killing his former employers as well as having a major persecution complex. It is not too long before she is being held prisoner in her own home and in mortal fear of her life .

Crisp direction from Harry Horner and two coiled spring performances by the estimable leads keep interest and tension high . Only a strident and conventional score ,replete with skittish strings and discordant brass ,plus a somewhat rushed ending mitigate against a higher rating.

Gripping and enjoyable all the same with both stars confirming how undervalued they still are.

Intense domestic suspense with the mistress of the house (Lupino, excellent as always) threatened by a psychotic migrant housecleaner (Ryan). The 2 masters of the genre are at their heady, erotic best as they match wits, emotions, and wills in a bizarre hostage situation right out of the Saturday Evening Post. Richly hued B & W photography with an unusual amount of close-up head shots. The young girl who teases Ryan is really well directed here. Improbable, but satisfying suburban melodrama.

Beware My Lovely originated from a play written by Mel Dinelli who apparently liked writing about frightened women. His first and best effort was the screenplay for The Spiral Staircase. He also did a Loretta Young suspense thriller Cause For Alarm a couple of years earlier. The play Dinelli wrote was originally entitled The Man and it ran for 92 performances on Broadway during the 1950 season. It was Dinelli's only effort on Broadway and it starred Dorothy Gish and Richard Boone.

The roles that Gish and Boone played are taken by Ida Lupino and Robert Ryan. For whatever reason RKO thought to eliminate the age difference. Dinelli himself rewrote his play for the screen so I'm wondering what he thought about that. Certainly the frailty issue was eliminated completely from the story.

That wasn't the only thing that was eliminated. The people are all wearing period clothing from around World War I yet there's no reference at all to the time this story takes place in. I thought that strange and later on when the telephone company repairman comes to Ida Lupino's residence, I noticed his truck was a vintage one of the same era.

The film is almost entirely set within Ida Lupino's home where she's hired an itinerant stranger in Robert Ryan as a handyman. The film is a great object lesson in not hiring strangers without reference. It turns out that Ryan is a schizophrenic who imprisons Lupino in her home for about a day.

Both the leads do fine jobs even with the changes made. Films like Beware My Lovely are the stuff that a small studio like RKO did best. If this were done at MGM or Paramount the glossy trappings would have overwhelmed a solid story.

Howard Wilton is a troubled man, driven by an anger he can barely control far less understand and plagued by blackouts and spells of amnesia. Finding a dead body in his pantry, he flees the scene and boards a train to continue his nomadic life. He takes a job at the home of widower Helen Gordon as a cleaner but soon finds himself feeling mocked and judged by Helen and others. When he breaks loose, Howard holds Helen in the house, with her fearing for her life from this irrational stranger.

I was attracted to this film because the title suggested a tough detective film noir – something that was backed up by the description of the film as such on this very site. Very quickly though I realised that this was down to some people's assumption that anything that is black and white and tough gets called a "noir" but I was not disappointed because this domestic thriller is driven by two very good performances. The film starts well with Howard quickly being marked out as unbalanced at best as he runs in fear and disgust from the very crime that he has committed; it isn't long before we see this end result starting to develop again in his new house. The plot is simple in this regard but it is the delivery that keeps it tense, with the confines of the house adding to the feeling of claustrophobia and lack of an escape route. It isn't outstanding stuff but what makes it work as well as it did was a pair of strong performances from the famous lead actors.

Ryan has the hammy role but manages to play it just right, delivering the complex character well while also convincing me that he could neither explain or control what he was doing. Lupino is as good as always and it is her palatable fear and confinement that gripped me and really made me buy into it. The support cast are ample but really Ryan and Lupino are hardly off the screen and it is the film's strength that they are all that it needs to do the job.

Overall this is not the film I was expecting but it was still very enjoyable and effective. The story is mainly kept within the house, upping the tension and the story is well delivered by two strong performances that make the film well worth seeing.

We are in a small town, a homely widow (Ida Lupino) hires a handyman (Robert Ryan) to look after her house. She soon starts to regret it as Ryan grows erratic by the hour, it appears that she is host to a dangerous schizophrenic, and now she is unable to escape her house.

Beware, My Lovely is adapted from Mel Dinelli's (The Spiral Staircase) story and play called "The Man". Pretty much a one set movie and a two character driven piece, the film boasts two great central performances and offers up an interesting take on mental illness. One however shouldn't be fooled into thinking this is a violent and nerve shredding picture, because it isn't. It's clear from the get go that Ryan's Howard Wilton is a dangerously troubled man, but this is a different sort of "peril" movie, one that throws up another slant on psychosis and thus making it difficult to hate our dangerous protagonist.

Ryan and Lupino are a great combination, they had also done the excellent, and far better, On Dangerous Ground this same year. So with both actors clearly comfortable together, it brings out a finely tuned character story all based in the confines of one house or prison as it were. Ryan is particularly strong as his character flits in and out of madness, with some scenes powerful and at times inducing fear, while at others garnering deep sympathy. The direction from Harry Horner is safe (he in truth doesn't have to do much other than let his actors run with it) and George E. Diskant's cinematography contains some smart and impacting visual touches -with one involving Christmas tree baubles immensely memorable.

Falling some where in between being average and great, picture has enough about it to make it a recommendation to fans of borderline and easy to follow film noir. For fans of Robert Ryan, though, it's something of an essential viewing, oh yes, and then some. 7/10