Teagarden1256

This typical Cold War spy thriller, full of impossible to understand plot turns, bad guys and bad girls who turn to be good, maybe, doesn't have much going for it except Max Greene's (Mutzy Greenbaum) dazzling B&W deep focus photography and one of John Williams' first atmospheric scores. Phil Karlson, the director, who occasionally made a decent film, was hired and then fired by star/producer Richard Widmark who mostly snarls. Karlson does an OK job with the confusing script, but this is no THIRD MAN. If you stop trying to figure out what the hell is going on, and just watch the imagery, worth your while. Added bonus: Lots of excellent European character actors looking sinister and the luscious Senta Berger looking delicious in one of her first English language roles.

Much maligned in its day as one of Hollywood's much too fervent attempts at atonement to the HUAC and McCarthy for having once hired so many communists, this slick Paramount picture made in 1952 remains a social document that reveals the right-wing views some members of the film community held during those dark days. It glorifies an idealized small-town family. Dad (Dean Jagger) is a solid hard-working citizen, a Legioner who finds time to toss around a football with his two blonde athletic sons about to fight the good war in Korea; he's a man who goes to church every Sunday. The flaw in the perfect unit is mother--who else?-- and her curse of too much Mommy love; Helen Hayes, for some reason, too obviously dotes on the son (Robert Walker) who doesn't play football, doesn't go to church, and prefers the company of college professors, yes professors, to his own family. He is, horror of horrors, a practicing self-admitted intellectual.

Needless to say, we eventually learn that any spoiled child brought up this way cannot be up to good. Despite this silly propogandist view of the true values of decent American life, the film is very well directed by the great Leo McCarey, excellently acted by all the leading players. Robert Walker, in his last film, is particularly effective as the non-athletic son with heretic (read unAmerican) views. If the film had been made a decade or so later, his secret would have been that he was gay, but as this is 1952, the sin is political.