The Shrike

A decent film ruined by a totally unbelievable ending. The final 2 minute scene went against everything I'd been viewing for the previous 90 minutes. I allow a wide berth in films, especially older ones, for unrealistic situations, characters, coincidences.....but I'm not sure if I've even seen anything like this. Judge for yourself.

June Allyson is really good in this movie but Isabel Bonner should be given some credit also. Especially when she was married to the writer and died playing her part. I wonder how much time went by between filming the movie and her death.

(July 2, 1955) ACTRESS DROPS DEAD ON CARTHAY CIRCLE STAGE The final curtain fell on the Carthay Circle Theater stage last night for Isabel Bonner, New York stage and television actress, who collapsed and died as she played a hospital bed scene with Actor Dane Clarck in "The Shrike." Miss Bonner, 47, who in private life is the wife of Joseph Kramm, author of "The Shrike," was seated by the bedside of Clark when she suddenly fell forward with her head down on the spread.

June Allyson steps way out of type for this bravura acting effort. It is a psychological study of a playwright (Jose Ferrer) slowly sinking into depression and attempting suicide unsuccessfully. Allyson plays his loving but demanding wife. It is very clinical and grimly realistic. Allyson is magnificent and 100% believable as the domineering wife who comes close to loving her man to death. Ferrer is very good as the brooding playwright who comes apart at the seams under the pressure he buys into. Edward Platt is very good as Ferrer's brother. Only Joy Page is a tad unbelievable as Ferrer's ultra-sympathetic would-be paramour. Altogether, I rate it 9/10.

I saw the movie about 50 years ago. A friend of mine, who had seen the play on Broadway, told me that his mother and her bridge club had journeyed from New Jersey to NYC to see it in a matinée performance, and she told him, as I remember, "We girls found it one-sided." My friend was a full fledged alcoholic by the age of twenty. He found the movie too true to be good, if I may put it so.

I loved June Alyson ever since I had seen her in Singing in the Rain and the movie, the Shrike, has always stayed with me, in part because I found it puzzling the one time I saw it. I would really like to see it again; only the passage of time leads me to give it a "9" rather than a "10".

Many strong images from the film remain in my memory: the squalid 12 x 6 hotel room lit by a bare bulb hanging like fly paper from the ceiling in which the attempted suicide took place; the impassive face of the psychiatrist listening to the wife's (shrike's) analysis of her husband; her shock when the shrink asks her whether she has sought therapeutic help for herself; and some other moments, too.

It may be one of the great movies. It seems to have been lost to memory. How can I get to see it again?

On Broadway, the Kramm play did have a more downbeat ending in that it is clear that there is no way for the two to ever live together again. BUT the ending, in the film, is essentially the same. No matter how much the wife, so brilliantly essayed by June Allyson, professes a change in her makeup, and no matter how they look walking hand-in-hand down the street, there is NO DOUBT that only further problems await this couple. There is definitely a cloud of doom over the whole thing, and even their steps are hesitant providing a clue to the future. Jose Ferrer chose Allyson for this film, and he was so right despite her feelings over the years that he may not have been. There should have been awards for her in The Shrike. (She had won honors for comedic turns in other films, including Too Young To Kiss, which pales in comparison to her work here). Her recent death only makes it sadder that her skills as an actress were never totallya realized by Hollywood. Her comedic and musical skills are evident in many films, but her serious work (The Secret Heart, for example) deserve to be studied again.