I have a tendency to confuse this with FAREWELL, MY LOVELY (with Robert Mitchum) and MURDER MY SWEET (with Dick Powell), not because the films have anything in common but because of the similarities in the titles. But, now I have them straight. 77 minutes or not, this one sounds good.

I first saw this movie when I served in Viet Nam 40 years ago. I was there for most of 1969 and we had Armed Forces Television. I haven’t seen it since but I remember how good Ryan and Lupino were.

It is interesting that Ryan worked with the same actors over and over and over. Lupino, Lancaster, Borgnine, Wayne, Marvin, Mitchum, Aldo Ray, Stanwyck, Gloria Grahame, Tina Louise. I wonder how many times these people requested him for projects.

You got some great images on this one like the fifth one down after your final paragraph when he is looking down and his eyebrows are accented making him look like Satan. Plus that last poster image looks like the quintessential pulp fiction paperback cover.

I hadn’t seen this one in some time, but enjoyed this movie more than I expected due to Ryan and Lupino‘s expert jockeying in this story, and George Diskant‘s very imaginative cinematography in the claustrophobic set, (love that image of the looming Ryan reflected through the Christmas ornament). Robert Ryan‘s disturbing and touchingly fragmented mental case is quite a realistic and yet highly theatrical creation, making his plight and his threatening presence much more moving, and seems to be a creation separate and beyond the mechanical quasi-gothic trappings of this film. Your account of this film was–as usual–delightful, Medusa, but I have a few oddball questions:

1.) WHAT the heck was with that striped tie that Robert Ryan wore throughout the film? Did he steal it from a passing five year old? Or was that simply one more visual clue that this guy was a bit short in other ways, too?

2.) There are two photos of Ida‘s dead hubby in his WWI uniform seen in the house, one alone and one with Ida. Is it possible that the guy in the photo might be Ms. Lupino‘s erstwhile creative collaborator, actor William Talman (best remembered by most of us as Hamilton Burger, the spectacularly unsuccessful DA in history when facing television’s Perry Mason, but also the star of Lupino’s 1953 directorial effort, The Hitch-Hiker)?

Hi Moira!

You know, perhaps sometimes a tie is only a tie, as the saying doesn’t quite go! lol But yeah…it’s pretty goofy, isn’t it? In the early parts he’s also wearing a sweater vest that kind of covers the shortfall..once that went, the secret was out! :-)

And I looked around a bit, and evidently it IS William Talman standing in for Ida’s husband: http://www.answers.com/topic/william-talman-actor

Pretty neat! Somebody needs to do a post on Talman — he’s also fascinating!

There is something about even a crazed homicidal handyman that becomes sublime when played by Ryan.

It’s a fun movie! Thanks for commenting!!

I just wanted to say thanks to TCM for playing this movie. Robert Ryan was excellently creepy. Eeek.

Like Robert Mitchum, Robert Ryan was one of the valuable stars for RKO which was a semi-major studio in Hollywood. RKO had a reputation for producing relatively small budgeted, and somewhat minor yet quite meaningful films with some brave experiments. Today, we are so happy to enjoy the films like KING KONG, CITIZEN KANE, THE MAGNIFICENY AMBERSONS, GUNGA DIN, I REMEMBER MAMA, CROSSFIRE, OUT OF THE PAST, THE SET-UP, THEY LIVE BY NIGHT, or ON DANGEROUS GROUND. Maybe, Ryan suffered being confined in the small studio with limited opportunities, now, his position can be described as blessings, because he could enlist his names in the quite interesting and experimental films.

I would nominate BERLIN EXPRESS and BEWARE, MY LOVELY as two of Robert Ryan’s most minor, yet experimental RKO films. In the former, he is the good guy, and in the latter, he is the trouble maker. The former is very experimental because it was the first film capturing the devastated post-war Germany. The latter is very interesting because it was done within very modest structure, only two people in one house. These two films were quite often neglected, but by screening them today, I am convinced that they are quite lovely cinematic art. BERLIN EXPRESS tried to say importance of the world unity, and BEWARE, MY LOVELY tried to express tragedy of a damaged person. Both films were simple, well done, and they have succeeded to convey their messages rather convincingly.

Ryan was truely superb actor, because his characters, Robert Lindley in BERLIN EXPRESS and Howard Wilton in BEWARE, MY LOVELY, are completely different person and it was quite difficult for an actor to establish such a solid difference. Nevertheless, Ryan managed to make each characters quite believable and even admirable.