dmh7

I didn't expect much from this, and my expectations were met brutally: it seemed to be five hours long. The "mystery" is easily solved a good hour or more before the actual revelation, and mainly nothing happens unless you really enjoy watching Creighton rub his kneecaps as a sign of "inner turmoil." Really quite awful...

I've seen a number of these "Inner Sanctum" stories, and this is easily among the worst, although few of them are exemplary. The radio show also had rather plodding story lines, but that medium's reliance on sound made that show a a stand-out in merely technical terms. On-screen however, it is difficult to comprehend how such badly-written tales could be watchable, even if the main actor wasn't Lon Chaney Jr. He is so bad in this film that even the usually moribund J. Carroll Naish appears forceful beside him.

A good way to ruin an evening.

Horrid. Truly, stultifyingly, wretchedly horrid. The "idea" (of having the inner thoughts of the characters spoken aloud for the audience) is a stilted one which doesn't work on stage either. But in a movie, where the voice-overs are added later, it forces the actors to create responses to feelings they are not having, and also prompts the actors into providing rather charmless and ugly facial "clues" to their inner thoughts. It makes for a bad cinematic experience. The story itself - adapted by Eugene O'Neill from a Greek play)is the purest "eternal triangle" tripe, and tripe which never really explores any true psychological impetus, but only deals with the thinnest of human motivations, so being "let in on" these great human secrets is no grand privilege. Norma is at her worst here; stagy and melodramatic, and most of the cast comes off equally badly. An experiment gone horribly wrong. I felt - at times - like slapping any or all of the characters, just to awaken them from their banal self-pity and deep delusions. And the only fun to be gotten from it is to replace the "inner speech" with phrases of your own. Otherwise, a very bad film.

Just caught this as part of a TCM tribute to Grace's career. Not much to say about it. There are some beautiful shots of the water, lots of big cars and boats, a rather nice visit to the ballet, and a good look at the outside and inside of the palace. It is all interspersed with some of the most fawning purple prose this side of Jackie Collins, and - all in all - a generously depressed air of decayed monarchy. We are led to believe (by the hard working hagiographer/narrator) that this all really means something, that it is a sunny symbol of the best life has to offer, that it is a manifestation of pure happiness in the form of a quite pretty but slightly gelid American princess. It doesn't ring true for one moment, but the disconnect found there is part of the reason it's bearable at all. Everybody appears to be working far too hard to keep up appearances, and all human vitality appears to have leaked out through the scullery doors. One hopes she was happy, but I read she wasn't particularly. Prince Rainier always seemed like a pill to me.