Almas em Desespero

June Allyson steps way out of type for this bravura acting effort. It is a psychological study of a playwright (Jose Ferrer) slowly sinking into depression and attempting suicide unsuccessfully. Allyson plays his loving but demanding wife. It is very clinical and grimly realistic. Allyson is magnificent and 100% believable as the domineering wife who comes close to loving her man to death. Ferrer is very good as the brooding playwright who comes apart at the seams under the pressure he buys into. Edward Platt is very good as Ferrer's brother. Only Joy Page is a tad unbelievable as Ferrer's ultra-sympathetic would-be paramour. Altogether, I rate it 9/10.

The Shrike was quite an eye opener for me seeing it for the very first time. It further confirmed my own opinion of the almost limitless talents of Jose Ferrer.

The roles associated with Ferrer, what he's best known for are such bravura performances as Cyrano DeBergerac and Toulouse-Lautrec in Moulin Rouge. His role in The Shrike is subdued and Ferrer conveys a great performance by use of his body language and facial expressions. Ferrer plays a theatrical director who makes a suicide attempt and is now in a psych ward and trying to get out.

Ferrer directed and starred on Broadway for 161 performances in the 1952 season. He did the same for the screen and wrote the background music for the film.

A lot of the cast came over from Broadway. One addition was June Allyson who was Hollywood's all American wife and sweetheart. She wanted to play a bad girl and I think she was cast in the part because to the outside world the wife is June Allyson, not the demanding woman Ferrer is married to. The public did not want to see June Allyson as she is here.

The scenes that are the best are in the sanitarium. Straight out of The Snake Pit, this film borrowed a lot from that classic.

Definitely a must for Jose Ferrer aficionados.

Before the ending to "The Shrike", I loved the film. José Ferrer, as usual, turned in a great performance and the story was very unusual and kept my interest. It's so sad, then, that the original and more downbeat ending was replaced with a ridiculous upbeat ending.

The story begins with a Broadway director, Jim Downs (Ferrer), is brought into the psychiatric emergency room. He'd just attempted suicide and they plan on keeping him for some time. Why he did it isn't exactly clear at the beginning of the film but over time you learn that his manipulative wife has a part in this. The problem now is that he cannot get out of the place without her help...and she doesn't exactly seem eager to let him out unless it's on her terms.

According to IMDB, June Allyson wanted to play a grittier role, but the studio execs got nervous when preview audiences couldn't accept the actress in a role where she isn't sweet. So, although the story is supposed to be about a harpy of a woman, inexplicably, the film walks back on this at the end...and ending that just doesn't ring true and undoes so much good in the movie.

First film directed by highly talented actor Jose ferrer ,who would direct his own version of the Dreyfus affair,long before Roman Polanski .

His portrayal of a failed playwright is thoroughly convincing : confined to a mental hospital after nearly taking his own live, he remembers his past ,his wife who dominated him , who treated him like a grown up kid , urging him to give up on his writer's job for a place in her father's business.Ill at ease with the other inmates , he sometimes wonders if it's not a wrongful confinement .June Allyson,cast against type, is not bad as a selfish wife who finally realizes she may need a shrink too .An over possessive woman ,she fears her husband may leave her for an actress ,Charlotte: in fact she does not see this thespian is a way for the writer to assert himself as a man.It's perhaps too bad that the ending should have been sweetened ;but do not miss Ferrer's excellent performance.

I saw this movie after I had been married for a while, and have thought about it a .lot. in the decades since. Why, you ask? I understand that so much of it, even the ending, will ring true for a certain type of person. And for others, it may seem unbelievable.

But love is not the wonderful live-happily-ever-after kind of thing that Hollywood loved to show in the old times. Love hurts, love drives you crazy, love makes you miserable sometimes.

Among your group of married people you know, there may easily be people who are trying frantically to extricate themselves from their relationship, or tragically and pathetically dream about it. If you discover who they are, ask .them. to see the movie or play and tell you what they think.

As Ferrer wanders through a doorway, beginning to move from "sad" to "crying" to "blubbering", it may seem over the top. Beware, you are just too used to what Hollywood and Broadway have been feeding you. Consider, instead, that this could indeed happen just this way in real life. This is a truly realistic movie.