One Year Later

"One Year Later" is a shockingly good picture. After all, it's a cheap B-movie, so you'd expect nothing special....and boy was I wrong!

The film begins with a couple getting married. Things look great. Then, a year passes and what a change....the husband is boarding a train headed to prison--where he's to be executed! You have no idea what happened and only through the course of the film do you learn when the wife tells a reporter their sad tale. Apparently, the husband's boss was a real pervert and he kept making overtures towards the young bride. When the husband began to suspect, he confronted the boss--and the boss fired him. However, the boss WAS willing to give the guy his job back if the wife would sleep with him! The husband arrives during this attempted rape and he attacks the boss. The boss pulls a gun but he is killed in the process. The case appears to be justifiable homicide or self-defense....but the jury didn't see it that way and he's going to die. But one of the reporters is also on the train because he's seriously ill and heading to a sanitarium....and he is shaken by the wife's story and decides to do something decent. What that is...well, you'll have to see the film.

If loved everything about the ending--it was riveting, suspenseful and tied everything together perfectly. Despite the film's humble roots, it's darned good entertainment...B-movie or not.

Interesting little movie, starting with a young lovey-dovey couple just married, then all of a sudden the film jumps one year ahead and everything has changed. This works really well -- you are left wondering what the heck happened. Then the story slowly starts to fill in the missing pieces. Everything has gone wrong.

And just about all of the action takes place on s couple of train rides. That's right, the characters are all stuck together for a day or so, so you know things are going to happen. Those were the days -- if you want the train experience today, go to Europe or Asia.

OK, there are some weak moments. The movie uses the same tired old Hollywood script device -- a misunderstanding that the protagonist doesn't make any effort to explain. Now if you were a woman being harassed by your husband's boss, you wouldn't say anything to your husband? Really? And your husband wouldn't understand? OK, so let that one slide -- but it's a cheap plot device by the script writers when they could make it a bit more true-to-life.

This film starts somewhat inauspiciously, but develops into something well worth watching.

The core story of One Year Later is that of Molly, a young woman desperate to reconcile with her husband before she loses him finally and terribly to the electric chair. Jim is to die for killing his former boss, the man with whom Jim thought his wife to have been having an affair. Sure that Molly was unfaithful, Jim will not so much as listen to her. Jim has been made to board a train headed to the prison in which he is to die. Molly has got a berth on the same train, trying as she might to talk to Jim.

Also riding towards death is Tony, a reporter dying of lung disease. Tony knows something of Jim and Molly's story, and wants to help in whatever way he can.

Secondary characters include J. Atwell Hunt, unfaithful to his own spouse, and Greggs, whom that spouse has hired to prove the infidelity.

One Year Later has its flaws. The beginning, as I indicated, is inauspicious. The secondary stories and characters should have been better developed or not developed at all. (Thus, by implication, the movie may be seen either as too short or as too long.) But the central story is rather well handled. Most of the acting is of fairly high quality and Mary Brian and Russell Hopton in particular do fine jobs with their roles. And the resolution was relatively novel and bittersweet, rather than being trite and saccharine as one might have expected.

I liked this movie better than I expected I would. I particularly liked the scenes in the train station – the hustle bustle of passengers, the newsstand, and the small vignettes of travelers. I was surprised at the large number of extras given my assumption that this was a low budget film. Since I'm a sucker for "train" movies, this movie was easy to like. The character actors got the best lines and the two lead characters were kinda bland although Mary Brian always does a nice job. The stock characters (obnoxious kid, call girl, unfaithful husband, wise-cracking entertainer, private detective) were all well played as was the reporter's role. The husband certainly was quick to assume his wife's infidelity and it seems not to have occurred to him that his boss was a lecherous old snake. And the wife acts like what happened was her fault - an attitude tough to understand. I liked the ending to the movie and was surprised by it.