Verlorenes Spiel

Can someone respond to let me know why the name "Lorrison" was featured in so many movies around this time? I have never heard of a person in real life with that name; yet it pops up over and over. And here, the character played by Ava Gardner is never referred to is Isabel but always, always, by both names.

I first saw this movie on TV as a teenager and assumed that life in Manhattan would be like this, just as thought the publishing world would be as it's portrayed in "The Best of Everything."

This has very chic settings -- the East side locations much more believable than the brief excursion into the West side area ostensibly the scene of Heflin -- and Stanwkyck's -- childhood.

The acting is good. The plot is engaging. Decent lines. The direction, though, is very static. All the style comes from the presumably Sutton Place location and the elegant interiors and from the fabulous cast of real movie stars, with James Mason a suave cad prefiguring his brilliant Humbert Humbert a bit more than a decade later.

Gale Sondergaard is amusing as Stanwyck's elderly mother. At one point, she says, "I'm 55 years old." Interesting, as in real life she was only eight years older than Stanwyck, who was 42 when this came out.

Still and all, this movie has stuck in my head for many years as the epitome of chic. The actors are all plausible as socialites, and Gardner is properly gorgeous and evil as a (very) beautiful girl who's hustled her way over from the wrong side of the tracks.

It's fun, but it could have been really great, given the performers, the original author and the screenwriter.

Mervyn LeRoy does it again. Exquisite cast, superb production >and tight story line make this a must see. Several persons in >this saga want revenge, but you'll have to see how it shakes out >to see just who gets whom. Barbara Stanwyck and Van Heflin are >united on screen once again (The Strange Loves of Martha Ivers) >with an unbelieveable supporting cast. Gale Sondergaard, Ava >Gardner, Cyd Charisse and Nancy Davis make up the bevy of head- >liners and head-turners in a film about love, lust and morality. >See how James Mason figures in with a great ending where some- >one makes a point and leaves no doubt what it's all about.

Barbara Stanwyck was a great actress over a long and distinguished career and this is an enjoyable drama about the lives and loves of upper income New Yorkers in the late forties. But as much as she delivers her usual sterling performance, I couldn't help but feel sorry for her as she is upstaged in the glamour stakes by both Cyd Charisse and Ava Gardner who are both at the apex of their beauty. A secondary niggle relating to the casting has both Babs and Cyd fighting for the affections of Van Heflin. Van Heflin!! On the other hand James Mason is well-cast as the weak-willed sleazy husband. Overall an impressive entry into the "woman's picture" of the forties genre.

Stanwyck and Heflin have a palpable chemistry here, and Ava Gardner is a most alluring vixen. Cyd Charisse is a delectable ingenue (and a tall drink of water), while Gale Sondergaard is hilarious as a hard-bitten, hoydenish Amazon floozie. Stanwyck is playing about 10 years younger than her actual age (her film mother admits to being 55, when Stanwyck is in her early forties here, and while still handsome, she does look her age).

Mervyn Leroy did a nice job of combining the noir/woman's-picture genres, though its ennoblement of Stanwyck robs her of her strengths as a no-nonsense woman, good or bad. Her scene with Gardner is a standout -- both actresses are well matched; Gardner's feline beauty and laissez-faire romantic approach nicely complements Stanwyck's humane fatalism -- and Stanwyck and Van Heflin are an appealing couple. Mason is rather a chump, however -- he seems to be underplaying to the point of lethargy, though his handsome charm surfaces here and there; yet he and Stanwyck, though matched in terms of age (she was younger by a couple of years) are not the type for each other; he doesn't suit her, screen-wise. Heflin's naturalism -- a performance of great charm and likability -- is more suited to Stanwyck's style and one longs for them to get together. Great use of sets to evoke New York, teeming with nightlife, and Leroy always had a knack for directing extras so that the city scenes seem peopled with real lives rather than populated with stand-ins. Costumes, though late 1940s, seem a bit recherche, as if the designer hadn't left the 1930s, with the women's gowns too ornate for such a sophisticated post-war milieu.

Not a great picture by any means, but a highly enjoyable one; a viewer wishes the director and screenwriter -- the talented Isobel Lennart, who later wrote "Two for the Seesaw," among many others -- had trusted more in the chemistry between Heflin and Stanwyck, and discarded some of the Marcia Davenport source material, juicy as it must have been. This is from Stanwyck's late-1940s string of women's flicks, which did not play to her strengths. But middling Stanwyck is usually better than anyone else's best. And the underrated Van Heflin is worth rooting for, too.

Extremely busy marital melodrama which (rather unsuccessfully) lapses into a homicide investigation! New York City socialite Barbara Stanwyck loves and trusts investment counselor husband James Mason--even though he has a penchant for disappearing after-hours and returning home at four in the morning. Turns out old flame Ava Gardner is back in town; she's a high-class man-chaser who won't take no for an answer. Screenwriter Isobel Lennart, working from the novel by Marcia Davenport, starts things off routinely, but keeps adding characters until the scenario is bubbling over like a stew-pot. Van Heflin does wonders with a shapeless role as a war correspondent/ex-detective who ends up in jilted Stanwyck's kitchen, flirting with her in Italian, while Gardner is offered some juicy repartee (when Mason calls her "cheap", Ava replies, "That's what you like about me."). A country square-dance is curiously transplanted to a Manhattan penthouse, and Beverly Michaels' supporting performance congeals into high camp; still, Barbara and Van have an immediate rapport--one that is not apparent in her scenes with Mason (who doesn't help his cause by portraying the cad-husband like a petulant boy). Stanwyck, outfitted and coiffed like a lady ten times her age, initially doesn't have much to do, but Lennart's script soon has her traveling all over the city--east side, west side, and beyond. It's a nervous, flighty picture, paced exhaustively by director Mervyn LeRoy, but overall quite watchable. **1/2 from ****