Lightning Strikes Twice

A murder mystery/romance from 1951. Richard Todd has just been released from prison for murder. A witness came forward who gave convincing testimony prompting his parole. Even though he knows he's going to be on the tongues of the gossiping hordes back home who believe he was guilty, he returns home. Into this melodrama comes an actress, played by Ruth Roman (famously for fighting rubber monsters in 1955's This Island Earth), out looking for a dude ranch for much needed R & R. Getting her rental car stuck in the mud during a torrential downpour, she finds herself in a seemingly desolate cottage where Todd has holed up who takes her in for the night & even provides her breakfast the next morn before she makes her way to her destination. Once there, we find out the caretaker, played by Mercedes McCambridge (who will forever be known as the voice of the demon in The Exorcist) & her younger brother, played by future Dobie Gillis star, Darryl Hickman, had a history w/Todd & who claims she witnessed the murder. As her curiosity soon starts to overwhelm her, Roman soon becomes enamored of Todd much to the chagrined of the townsfolk, especially those who knew the murder victim. Once marriage is proposed & consummated, the truth of the past crime soon rears up, putting Roman in doubt of the man she married. Pretty good for the most part, the film only falters (still, for some, in a good way!) when it veers into sheer camp as Roman realizes the potential error in her ways moments after she's exchanged vows & when the killer is revealed, no piece of scenery is safe from excess chewing. Also starring my favorite cinematic sleaze, Zachary Scott, here playing an old friend of Todd's.

It's lurid and ludicrously plotted. Yet despite, or perhaps because of its overwrought melodrama, it's oddly entertaining, like a Carol Burnett parody of one of those classic "women's pictures". If you can just give in to the absurdities of the story, you might have a good time. The acting is slightly over-the-top, but it suits the material.

If something is really good, I will forgive plot holes or situations that stretch the imagination. I won't do it here.

"Lightning Strikes Twice" stars Ruth Roman, Richard Todd, Mercedes McCambridge, and Zachary Scott. Roman plays an actress, Shelley Carnes, who has been sent out west for her health and is going to a dude ranch. The talk on the train is about Richard Trevelyan who was convicted of murdering his wife and received a death sentence. He was given a stay of execution pending a new trial and freed because the jury had one holdout who thought he was not guilty.

When her car gets stuck in the mud, Shelley is helped by a man in a house nearby, who turns out to be Trevelyan. She leaves the next day. The dude ranch, it turns out, is closed. She is invited by the caretakers Liza and String (McCambridge and Darryl Hickman) to stay for a few days anyway. She has already met their neighbors, who were friends of Trevelyan. Everyone seems to be looking for him. She learns that Liza was the one holdout on the jury. Because he wasn't convicted, the people in town are nasty to her (reminds me of the Casey Anthony trial where the local restaurants wouldn't serve jurors). Liza believes in his innocence.

Shelley meets Richard again, and the two of them fall in love. Shelley wants to prove him not guilty. But was he? This noirish film was a nice diversion thanks to the acting, but it had a few problems. The first is, what the heck was Liza doing on the jury if she knew this guy? Doesn't that suggest a certain prejudice? Second, things happen too fast. Roman and Todd are madly in love after one kiss and a couple of days. Third, why was Zachary Scott in this film? Talk about being superfluous, and he was hardly in it anyway.

Richard Todd is miscast as Trevelyan. He and Roman make a beautiful couple, and Todd was a good actor, but he is out of place in the west, given his accent and bearing. As someone on the board suggested, Scott may have been a better choice for the role, or Jim Davis.

The rest of the acting is very good, with a strong performance by Mercedes McCambridge and a solid one by Roman. In the end, though, this film is pretty routine, though atmospheric.

Definitely worth a look. Immediately following his "Beyond the Forest" and "The Fountainhead" (also Warners), this Vidor film is somewhat less feverish and over-the-top than those two, and accordingly does not pack the same punch, but still has a nice erotic frisson. It's a whodunit with romance--including a rainstorm when the two leads meet in an isolated house. Ruth Roman is lovingly photographed and underscored by luscious Steiner music in this threatened-bride tale. Mercedes McCambridge does some of the same kind of scenery chewing that Davis did in "Forest," while Zachary Scott reprises his charming scoundrel from many Warner's films.

Richard Todd sits on death row, waiting execution for his wife's murder. At the eleventh hour, a reprieve and new trial come through; he's acquitted, thanks to one holdout juror (Mercedes McCambridge). Released, he disappears into the west Texas desert.

Enter Ruth Roman, a touring actress in search of the desert's restorative climate. An innkeeper and his wife become solicitous of her when she stops in a small town, and lend her a car to get to the dude ranch where she hopes to recuperate. En route (in a scene prescient of Janet Leigh's flight from Phoenix in Psycho), she gets lost in thunderstorms and takes refuge in an abandoned house -- where Todd is holed up. They size one another up and, next morning, she continues on to the dude ranch. Run by McCambridge and her emotionally disturbed young brother (Darryl Hickman), it has closed down, but they agree to put Roman up for a few days. But she seeks out Todd again, despite conflicting stories about his guilt or innocence.

Director King Vidor and scriptwriter Lenore Coffee, having goaded Bette Davis to pull out all the stops in Beyond The Forest two years earlier, here take on another overloaded melodrama, with mixed results. We see too little of key events and rely instead on hearsay about other characters, who sometimes haven't yet been sufficiently established (and the one brief flashback is a mistake -- we need either more or none). And of eight major characters, two or even three (including Zachary Scott) prove superfluous. But the movie's biggest stumble lies in the casting of Richard Todd. Remembered if at all as the title character in that echt-1950s biopic of pious patriotism A Man Called Peter, here his stiff British accent and acting falsify the whole Southwestern milieu (Lightning Strikes Twice, like Desert Fury of five years earlier, evokes the new Sunbelt of money and leisure).

Happily, the female characters fall on the plus side. Kathryn Givney shows spunk and intelligence as the strangely solicitous Mrs. Nolan. Ruth Roman, on evidence of this movie and Tomorrow Is Another Day, had more range and subtlety than she was let display in her best known role as Farley Granger's mannikin-like fiancee in Strangers on a Train. But the acting honors, inevitably, fall to McCambridge. Looking especially tomboyish, her face registers every thought and feeling that passes through her head; she's hyper-alert in her moods and responses. And so, as was her custom during her disappointingly thin screen career, she delivers the most memorable performance of the film.