Beware, My Lovely

Intense domestic suspense with the mistress of the house (Lupino, excellent as always) threatened by a psychotic migrant housecleaner (Ryan). The 2 masters of the genre are at their heady, erotic best as they match wits, emotions, and wills in a bizarre hostage situation right out of the Saturday Evening Post. Richly hued B & W photography with an unusual amount of close-up head shots. The young girl who teases Ryan is really well directed here. Improbable, but satisfying suburban melodrama.

Howard Wilton is a troubled man, driven by an anger he can barely control far less understand and plagued by blackouts and spells of amnesia. Finding a dead body in his pantry, he flees the scene and boards a train to continue his nomadic life. He takes a job at the home of widower Helen Gordon as a cleaner but soon finds himself feeling mocked and judged by Helen and others. When he breaks loose, Howard holds Helen in the house, with her fearing for her life from this irrational stranger.

I was attracted to this film because the title suggested a tough detective film noir – something that was backed up by the description of the film as such on this very site. Very quickly though I realised that this was down to some people's assumption that anything that is black and white and tough gets called a "noir" but I was not disappointed because this domestic thriller is driven by two very good performances. The film starts well with Howard quickly being marked out as unbalanced at best as he runs in fear and disgust from the very crime that he has committed; it isn't long before we see this end result starting to develop again in his new house. The plot is simple in this regard but it is the delivery that keeps it tense, with the confines of the house adding to the feeling of claustrophobia and lack of an escape route. It isn't outstanding stuff but what makes it work as well as it did was a pair of strong performances from the famous lead actors.

Ryan has the hammy role but manages to play it just right, delivering the complex character well while also convincing me that he could neither explain or control what he was doing. Lupino is as good as always and it is her palatable fear and confinement that gripped me and really made me buy into it. The support cast are ample but really Ryan and Lupino are hardly off the screen and it is the film's strength that they are all that it needs to do the job.

Overall this is not the film I was expecting but it was still very enjoyable and effective. The story is mainly kept within the house, upping the tension and the story is well delivered by two strong performances that make the film well worth seeing.

Ida Lupino is trapped in her own home by crazy Robert Ryan in "Beware, My Lovely," a 1952 film from RKO. Lupino and Ryan did three films together and worked well as a team, both being consummate professionals and strong performers.

In this film, based on a Broadway play called "The Man," Lupino is a World War I widow who rents out a room in her home. She's very active and well-liked in her community and though her husband has been dead for two years, she's not ready to move on. The man who rents her room goes on vacation, and Lupino hires Robert Ryan to help her with some heavy-duty cleaning in the house.

He's friendly enough to start, but later terrorizes her, locking her in the house, and not allowing her to answer the phone or the door, as he grows violent and more out of touch with reality.

The character played by Ryan is shown in the beginning of the movie running away when he discovers a dead body in another house he's working in. It isn't clear whether or not he's the killer, since he seems surprised to see the body.

He might be a split personality, as when his personality turns ugly toward Lupino, he seems to have no memory of his activities when he comes out of it. He doesn't know that he has the keys to Lupino's house in his pocket and doesn't know why he has tickets to a party that he bought from young children who came to the door.

"Beware, My Lovely," is a very suspenseful film, and the two leads give terrific performances. The tension builds to a very high level and ends in a way you're not expecting.

We are in a small town, a homely widow (Ida Lupino) hires a handyman (Robert Ryan) to look after her house. She soon starts to regret it as Ryan grows erratic by the hour, it appears that she is host to a dangerous schizophrenic, and now she is unable to escape her house.

Beware, My Lovely is adapted from Mel Dinelli's (The Spiral Staircase) story and play called "The Man". Pretty much a one set movie and a two character driven piece, the film boasts two great central performances and offers up an interesting take on mental illness. One however shouldn't be fooled into thinking this is a violent and nerve shredding picture, because it isn't. It's clear from the get go that Ryan's Howard Wilton is a dangerously troubled man, but this is a different sort of "peril" movie, one that throws up another slant on psychosis and thus making it difficult to hate our dangerous protagonist.

Ryan and Lupino are a great combination, they had also done the excellent, and far better, On Dangerous Ground this same year. So with both actors clearly comfortable together, it brings out a finely tuned character story all based in the confines of one house or prison as it were. Ryan is particularly strong as his character flits in and out of madness, with some scenes powerful and at times inducing fear, while at others garnering deep sympathy. The direction from Harry Horner is safe (he in truth doesn't have to do much other than let his actors run with it) and George E. Diskant's cinematography contains some smart and impacting visual touches -with one involving Christmas tree baubles immensely memorable.

Falling some where in between being average and great, picture has enough about it to make it a recommendation to fans of borderline and easy to follow film noir. For fans of Robert Ryan, though, it's something of an essential viewing, oh yes, and then some. 7/10

I saw this film yesterday for the first time, and I guess it shows that one's opinions of beauty (and the caliber of acting) really are in the "eyes of the beholder." I decided to write this "review" for one primary reason: The writer of the first review referred to Ida Lupino's role as that of "a homely widow." Homely? If Ida was "homely" in this film, then my taste in women must be flat ass backwards. I thought she was gorgeous, quite possibly the best I've ever seen her look. The other reviewers with whom I strongly disagree are those who criticized the acting. Say what you will about the film (it undeniably had it's flaws as well as its strengths), IMHO, the acting of the two principals was absolutely spectacular. Robert Ryan's expressions changed almost by the second as he slipped into, and out of, reality. And Ida was magnificent from beginning to end. I agree that the ending was a major disappointment. My immediate reaction to it was to say to myself, "THAT'S the end?" Nevertheless, the experience of watching those two performers play off each other for an hour and a half is definitely one that I would strongly recommend.