एक दोहरा जीवन

If you like "Othello," you'll love this flick since half the movie revolves around the stage production of the play.

The film has a great cast with Signe Hasso and Shelley Winters as the women in Colman's life while Edmond O'Brien plays the enterprising press agent.

A couple of the supporting players I particularly liked were Millard Mitchell as the grizzled reporter who finds an angle and Joe Sawyer, the 1940's answer to Drew Carey, who plays the cop on the case.

Great raw moments in this one with noir realism throughout.

Films like people age very differently from one another. Some are almost unwatchable due to the complete difficulty in sympathizing with outdated modes of thinking. The truly great films of course are timeless and leave you instead with a marvel for their wonderful freshness. Colman's Oscar winning portrayal of a stage actor who loses his grip on reality, while great to watch for the actor's work, is sadly wrapped inside of a rather poorly constructed film. None of it very believable, and the characters muster zero sympathy from us. The relationship lines are vague and confusing, and for the most part unimportant. The whole story is uncommonly weak, what you will remember most are the hammed up but effective scenes from Othello. Colman's genteel whisky cured voice, and aristocratic affectations you can tell are in him the genuine articles. He though also dated, is interesting to behold, and thought provoking as you get a feel for what was considered the best acting 60 years ago, and how different it is today. The film includes a couple of rather daring and explicit sexual innuendos, unusual for its time.

Ronald Colman gives an electrifying performance as Tony John, a Broadway actor who can't separate his offstage life from Shakespeare's Othello, the character he plays on stage....Two important scenes illustrate Tony's dilemma. The first one takes place in producer Max Lasker's office. Acting is a matter of talent for the practical-minded Lasker. But Donlan, Tony's friend, disagrees: "No, no. When you do it like Tony does it, it's much more. The way he has of becoming someone else every night...so completely. No, don't tell me his whole system isn't affected by it."....The other scene occurs in waitress Pat Kroll's apartment. Tony tells her his name is Martin. She thanks him. Then he says: "Or Paul. Hamlet. Joe. And maybe Othello."....When Tony begins rehearsing Othello, we learn that though he's trying to keep his real life separated from his stage life, "The part begins to seep into your life, and the battle begins. Reality against imagination." He can't keep the two separated: In his mind Pat is Desdemona and he's Othello, and he wrongly believes she has been unfaithful to him. He murders her....Colman's bravura performance, in a complex and difficult role, earned him 1947's Academy Award for Best Actor. Oscar nominations went to Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin for Best Original Screenplay. Not to be overlooked is Milton Krasner's atomspheric cinematography.

I was astonished at how good this picture was - Ronald Colman's scenery chewing was great, as well as the script and all supporting performances, as well as it being one of George Cukor's better but least seen works. It is a very disquieting film, almost in a Hitchcockian sort of way, and perhaps that accounts for its obscurity. Besides, an early Shelley Winters film is all right by me (carumba!) Hopefully you can find a better print than the one I saw on cable which looked like it was culled from a 16mm positive. C'mon, film preservationists, get on it!

While COVID-isolated, I binge-watched Ryan Murphy's "Hollywood", a hypothetical look at what US entertainment could've been had people stood up to racism and homophobia in the 1940s. A couple of episodes depict George Cukor, and one episode mentions "A Double Life". A few days after watching that episode I saw the movie in question. It's an intense one, with Ronald Colman (in an Oscar-winning role) as a thespian who lets his performance gain too much control of his existence. It's impressive how, in these movies focusing on stage performances, the play can sometimes come across as more intense than the person's life, as happens in this movie.

It's not a masterpiece, but Colman puts on one of the most haunting performances of all. I definitely recommend it