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Wednesday, March 10, 2021

LONELYHEARTS (1958)

Neither bright-eyed nor bushy-tailed, Montgomery Clift, in his second film after a near-fatal car crash, is miscast as a cub reporter taken on by sadistic newspaper editor Robert Ryan to write a Miss Lonelyhearts column.  But Monty’s casting is the least of the problems on this woebegone project from Dore Schary, his first since ankling as M-G-M’s post-Louis B. Mayer Production Chief.  Larded with phony sincerity, this adaptation of Howard Teichmann’s flop play doesn’t feel at all like Nathaniel West’s famous story, but a maudlin (late) coming-of-age tale as Clift gets personally involved with manipulative letter writer Maureen Stapleton and lives to regret it.  Is she victim or perpetrator?*  Myrna Loy elegantly shares a few drinks as editor Robert Ryan’s fallen wife and Dolores Hart is a fresh young thing Clift intermittently attends to.  Everybody learns a lesson or two, then moves on.  Everyone but the production staff with Schary (just in his mid-50s) launching only two more films and novice director Vincent J. Donehue, busy with B’way & live tv, only one.  Judging by this, the loss was inconsiderable.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: It takes some doing to make cinematographer John (‘Prince of Darkness’) Alton look bad, but Schary & Donehue manage with a production design and Golden Age tv technique that makes every setup and shot look like Playhouse 90.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINK: *Already famous in stage circles, Stapleton got an Oscar® nom. out of this, but her effects are all misjudged.  It’d take a decade (and four widely spaced films) before she figured out how to get her peculiar brilliance across on screen.  In of all things, that slickest of late old-school Hollywood hits AIRPORT/’70.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/01/airport-1970.html

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