The Shrike

Before the ending to "The Shrike", I loved the film. José Ferrer, as usual, turned in a great performance and the story was very unusual and kept my interest. It's so sad, then, that the original and more downbeat ending was replaced with a ridiculous upbeat ending.

The story begins with a Broadway director, Jim Downs (Ferrer), is brought into the psychiatric emergency room. He'd just attempted suicide and they plan on keeping him for some time. Why he did it isn't exactly clear at the beginning of the film but over time you learn that his manipulative wife has a part in this. The problem now is that he cannot get out of the place without her help...and she doesn't exactly seem eager to let him out unless it's on her terms.

According to IMDB, June Allyson wanted to play a grittier role, but the studio execs got nervous when preview audiences couldn't accept the actress in a role where she isn't sweet. So, although the story is supposed to be about a harpy of a woman, inexplicably, the film walks back on this at the end...and ending that just doesn't ring true and undoes so much good in the movie.

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.

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 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.