Meu Coração Tem Dois Amores

Producer Sydney Boehm also adapted John Mantley's book for the screen, an emotionally-tangled tale of a widow and her young son in Saskatchewan who advertise for help running their farm; a rugged yet oddly child-like logger (and an acquaintance of the widow's late husband) takes the job, while gossiping tongues wag back in town. Seems the logger has a chequered past and a mercurial temper, which should send warning signs to our heroine (Susan Hayward)--who ends up doing what all simp-heroines in soap operas do, she marries him! The opening prologue of about 12 minutes could have been dispatched with just two or three lines of dialogue, while the mix of on-location photography, studio shots and intermittent nature footage causes the film's visual sense to look mighty inconsistent. The exteriors are very pretty, yet the human drama at the forefront is blobby and unformed (particularly with Stephen Boyd's character). Hayward is less domineering than usual (and she seems to fall down a lot around horses!), but playing Mommy doesn't appear to be her forté. **1/2 from ****

This neighbors to the North melodrama was released by 20th Century Fox after Hayward's Oscar win for "I Want To Live!" It isn't a terrible film, but it isn't terribly good either. Hayward's Mary Sharron is widowed early in the story when her husband is killed by a falling flaming tree during a forest fire. Hayward grieves. Tries to run the farm herself. Is forced to hire moody Fred Carter (Steven Boyd). Hayward watches him chop wood in a tight white tee shirt and eventually marries him. Her son Robbie (Dennis Holmes) - a dreamy kid who hangs out by a quicksand pit and enjoys watching stock footage fauna frolic in the woods, has some difficulties with Carter - especially when Carter kills a deer and forces Robbie to watch the gutting. Carter gets tougher and touchier and more and more moody - he's a ball of psychological sturm und drang roiling with anger centered on his mamby pamby brother.... Carter's Canadian accent grows thicker as the plot careens toward rain and resolution. Carter rapes Mary - she becomes pregnant - Carter moves out to the barn - and threatens to leave altogether. Rain arrives, signaling: (as it always does) change. Carter carries Mary miles in the torrential downpour to town so that she can deliver her baby safely. She eventually learns of this selfless endeavor and her heart softens again. But, Carter is redeemed only after Robbie pulls him from the foreshadowed quicksand sinkhole. Unfortunately Hayward doesn't get much of a chance to crackle but fun performances and a decent amount of melodrama make this a fair one to catch.

I found the title of this film slightly misleading as Susan Hayward shuns her glamorous looks to play "Mary". She lives happily with her husband and young son "Robbie" (Dennis Holmes) until a forest fire renders her a widow and she really begins to struggle to maintain their small farm. Things might improve though when "Fred" (Stephen Boyd) arrives on the scene. He had been working at a local lumber mill but the conflagration put paid to that. For C$80 per month, he agree to stick around the place and help out. He sleeps in an annexe to the barn and as time passes it becomes clear what's going to happen next... "Fred" has something of the "Jekyll" to him though, and as he struggles to relate to the youngster and increasingly to his new wife, we discover that he has some baggage of his own and that is seriously compromising his new family. Tempers - and the weather - flare up and soon lives are in danger. Boyd does an ok job here, but is hampered by the scope of his character. The man we see at the start of the film isn't really the violent, bad-tempered, man we see in the middle - and we only have sparse crumbs to explain this change from the rather undercooked screenplay. The production benefits from some fine cinematography, it also suffers from some clearly studio based external scenes and a snow storm that must have all but exhausted the Californian confetti supply. Hayward offers a convincing performance here as the doting mother and the film tells a story of the pioneering spirit from a slightly different perspective.

Susan Hayward, Stephen Boyd, and Theodore Bikel star in "Woman Obsessed," a 1959 film set in Canada.

Mary Shannon (Hayward) is a grieving widow with a young son (Dennis Holmes) who hires a man named Carter (Boyd) to help her with her farm. They eventually marry, in part to stop the town gossip. Carter turns out to be more troubled than he let on, and becomes angry with the boy, whom he considers a coward, and then violent toward Mary. When a crisis occurs, Mary learns what's behind Carter's outburst toward her son and the resulting violence toward her.

The acting in this film helps the movie, which is slowed down and cut up by too many establishing shots of beautiful scenery. Hayward does a good job as a strong woman who attempts to put her grief aside and move on, but finds it difficult. And Boyd is excellent as a man in great pain who faces rejection from the people he loves; the more he's rejected, the more angry he becomes.

Slow moving. It's a shame we lost Boyd so early on - he was a strong actor and very handsome.

The title is a misnomer :actually ,it's the male character who had a mysterious past -revealed to the doctor at the end of the movie.

Henry Hathaway has always been one of my favorite American directors :he has always been eclectic ("lives of a Bengal lancer" and "Pete Ibbbetson" the same year!);here an interesting example of the way the director has almost totally mastered the style of Douglas Sirk's melodramas (particularly "all that heaven allows" and "all I desire").

Susan Hayward was perfect as ever as the widow whereas Stephen Boyd was trying to get rid of that "Messala skin" ,a thing he could never achieve:he gives an effective performance ,very nice when he appears for the first time,then oddly turning into a crude brute before redeeming himself ;whatever he plays ,he is convincing.

In fact,the worst character is the brat :his biological father disappears in the first minutes and the relationship with his son is underwritten;thus he sometimes appears selfish and even cruel (the pitchfork);ditto for Mary:she seems to be only concerned by her own pain,and it takes the words of a doctor -who becomes a true shrink- to make her feel that others too had a raw deal in their past .

Nice use of the locations and of the animals feeling the fire in the forest.