Pamsanalyst

Sissy Spacek has this kind of part down pat, so praise comes too matter-of-fact. I liked the 'Aw Shucks" charm of Eric Roberts as the sailor who receives a 'Dear John" telephone call, and once he disappeared from the film, a lot of its life fizzled away. It's a small film with limited exposition, so that the dinner scene with the boys substituting their long lost father for the departed Teddy seemed to come from almost nowhere. Then despite all of their wailing, they gladly fall in with Mom's desire to move to San Antonio. Then it is headlong into a scene that is part To Kill A Mockingbird and part Straw Dogs.

The problem with the script, and I suspect the screenwriter realized this, is that the Raggedy Man sails too close to Boo Radley, and so the plot must steer away from devices like having the boys be afraid of him. Yet he cannot disappear, so we have shots of him lurking about, or shots of his shop, lest we forget he is part of the story.

I think the film would have worked without him even being part of it, a small tale of a thwarted four day liberty if told from the sailor's point of view, or better, simply a tale of a four day honeymoon for the divorced women. But heaven forbid, there would have been little action. Somehow the ending violence robbed me of my memory of Sissy dancing with her broom while the Andrews Sisters sang.

From the opening scene down on the old rubber plantation to the final triumph of the inscrutable orient, this film keeps us in our seat. Wyler,the screenwriters, and Leslie Crosbie manage to wreck three lives in an amazing 98 minutes. Hammond was dead a few frames into the film, but lawyer Stephenson will never be able to practice his trade with the same suave surety again, and husband Marshall is unlikely to ever recover from the kick in the gut as Leslie/Bette Davis tells him she still loves the man she killed.

Maugham's tight little melodrama comes off better in the hands of master Wyler than Forster's Passage to India, another tale of colonial life brought to the screen by David Lean. Made in 1940, and written long before that, Maugham's and the film's characters did not have to include an Edward Fox giving an apologia for his fellow white men, and so we are able to concentrate on the pure melodrama of the story of a woman who shot her lover.

Stephenson is wonderful; as we watch we wonder what price he will ask Davis to pay for his breaking of the rules. He never speaks to her without a pause, as if to say 'what I am telling you is not all that is on my mind' and there is a certainty that he does not know what she will do with this information in the future.

Davis was probably the only actress of that time to be able to carry off her role, but the comment of another reviewer that she is not colonial enough is very well taken. We are used to seeing weak men playing opposite her, but Marshall provides more dignity than that as the noble cuckold.

My only fear is that someone will try to remake it today.