Loaded with Hollywood pros in front & behind the camera, this box-office bomb would be inexplicably amateurish if you didn’t know Howard Hughes was now running R.K.O., micro-managing it into a death spiral. Robert Mitchum was luckier than most at the beleaguered studio, but not in this mossy meller where his New Orleans research doctor is jilted by tru-love Ava Gardner; stopped by class & pride even though her keepers, Aunt Lucille Watson & Cousin Melvyn Douglas, are strapped for cash in the grand family manse. Worse, Mitchum returns to town married to pretty fortune hunter Janis Carter. And just when Ava turns out to have inherited a fortune from ‘the wrong side’ of the family! You can see a faint trace of the rip-snorting romance this one might have been: accidental murder, a juicy trial, hints of family scandal soon figure into things. But the production is strikingly unprofessional with continuity jumps, ‘wrong’ reverse angles & missing lines. Hard to fathom solid craftsman Robert Stevenson directed.* No doubt, Hughes hacked away over many nights until this was as senseless as it was moldy. The 1'10" running time a good half-hour shorter than usual for these things.* But kudos to Douglas for his cheery showing as an utterly amoral swine; he nearly makes up for Watson’s Mom, in her final feature, fraudulent as ever.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Steady-at-the-helm Stevenson may just be the most successful Hollywood director you’ve never heard of. Strictly by admissions rather than receipts, and keeping in mind that so many in his audience were kids at half-price, only Spielberg competes with the man behind all those top-grossing Disney titles (OLD YELLER to FLUBBER; MARY POPPINS to THE LOVE BUG and THAT DARN CAT; many, many more). Before Disney, too, his best probably the Joan Fontaine/Orson Welles JANE EYRE/’43.
WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: *Like Ingrid Bergman & Gary Cooper in Edna Ferber’s SARATOGA TRUNK/’45 at 2' 15". https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/08/saratoga-trunk-1945.html
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