Twenty-Four Hours in a Woman's Life

A 1961 black and white film made for television and poorly and unfairly received, this work is based upon a novella by Stefan Zweig, and provides an interesting story, told in spare and elegant fashion and, typically for the Austrian writer: in flashback, of a middle-aged woman who is persuaded by her family to travel through Europe as a means of overcoming longstanding grief at the death of her husband, to whom she was married for 17 years. While in Monte Carlo, the woman (Ingrid Bergman) meets with a family friend, played tastefully by John Williams, who escorts her to a casino where her path crosses that of a young gambler (Rip Torn), a depressive with the customary problem of wagerers, that of having lost everything, and she and the young man become entangled in a brief relationship that will mark the woman for the remainder of her life. The scenario, by novelist John Mortimer, is a faithful transcription of the original, with a challenging part for Bergman, and the only real weakness of the production is a tendency of Method-trained Torn to attack and hurry his lines; the score by John Kleinsinger is appropriately romantic and the ending, with the woman now old and recalling the events of the narrative, is strikingly subtle.

The good news is Ingrid Bergman looks really beautiful in Twenty-Four Hours in a Woman's Life. The bad news is the story isn't very good. She certainly tries her best, and you can easily imagine her reaching audiences in a theater, but since it's a live television production, the camera angles and scene transitions weren't such that movie audiences would hail it as her best performance ever.

She starts the show made up as an old woman who intervenes in a family crisis. Her granddaughter wants to run away with a boy she's only known for one day. Ingrid tells her the story of when she was young and fell in love with a man she'd only known for one day. In a Parisian flashback, she meets compulsive gambler Rip Torn and gets a psychic feeling that he's going to kill himself because he's lost all his money. For some unexplained reason, she makes it her mission to save him, so she gets him a hotel room and keeps him company to hopefully instill him with a love of life again. The only problem is she's a well-bred, classy lady, and he's absolutely no good with no respect for her. So it's a pretty one-dimensional story with no surprises. Still, if you're an Ingrid fan and like seeing her in period costumes, you can try it. It's not great if you're a Rip Torn fan, since he doesn't do much besides yell at her.