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.

The Shrike was quite an eye opener for me seeing it for the very first time. It further confirmed my own opinion of the almost limitless talents of Jose Ferrer.

The roles associated with Ferrer, what he's best known for are such bravura performances as Cyrano DeBergerac and Toulouse-Lautrec in Moulin Rouge. His role in The Shrike is subdued and Ferrer conveys a great performance by use of his body language and facial expressions. Ferrer plays a theatrical director who makes a suicide attempt and is now in a psych ward and trying to get out.

Ferrer directed and starred on Broadway for 161 performances in the 1952 season. He did the same for the screen and wrote the background music for the film.

A lot of the cast came over from Broadway. One addition was June Allyson who was Hollywood's all American wife and sweetheart. She wanted to play a bad girl and I think she was cast in the part because to the outside world the wife is June Allyson, not the demanding woman Ferrer is married to. The public did not want to see June Allyson as she is here.

The scenes that are the best are in the sanitarium. Straight out of The Snake Pit, this film borrowed a lot from that classic.

Definitely a must for Jose Ferrer aficionados.

First film directed by highly talented actor Jose ferrer ,who would direct his own version of the Dreyfus affair,long before Roman Polanski .

His portrayal of a failed playwright is thoroughly convincing : confined to a mental hospital after nearly taking his own live, he remembers his past ,his wife who dominated him , who treated him like a grown up kid , urging him to give up on his writer's job for a place in her father's business.Ill at ease with the other inmates , he sometimes wonders if it's not a wrongful confinement .June Allyson,cast against type, is not bad as a selfish wife who finally realizes she may need a shrink too .An over possessive woman ,she fears her husband may leave her for an actress ,Charlotte: in fact she does not see this thespian is a way for the writer to assert himself as a man.It's perhaps too bad that the ending should have been sweetened ;but do not miss Ferrer's excellent performance.

I saw this movie after I had been married for a while, and have thought about it a .lot. in the decades since. Why, you ask? I understand that so much of it, even the ending, will ring true for a certain type of person. And for others, it may seem unbelievable.

But love is not the wonderful live-happily-ever-after kind of thing that Hollywood loved to show in the old times. Love hurts, love drives you crazy, love makes you miserable sometimes.

Among your group of married people you know, there may easily be people who are trying frantically to extricate themselves from their relationship, or tragically and pathetically dream about it. If you discover who they are, ask .them. to see the movie or play and tell you what they think.

As Ferrer wanders through a doorway, beginning to move from "sad" to "crying" to "blubbering", it may seem over the top. Beware, you are just too used to what Hollywood and Broadway have been feeding you. Consider, instead, that this could indeed happen just this way in real life. This is a truly realistic movie.

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.