This is a very strange movie.\u00a0 Robert Montgomery plays Danny, a young man working at a hotel when a murder takes place.\u00a0 The police suspect him but a rich cantankerous old woman, Mrs. Bramson, hires him to be her personal assistant and live in her home on an isolated forested estate.\u00a0 Supposedly Danny is going to marry Bramson\u2019s maid Dora.\u00a0 But he seems more interested in Bramson\u2019s niece Olivia played by Rosalind Russell.\u00a0 To round out the household is the acid-tongued cook Emily.<\/p>\n
So that\u2019s the setup.\u00a0 Mrs. Bramson is a bitter unpleasant woman who even despises her own niece but Danny pretends affection for the old lady and a sensitivity to her problems and becomes her closest companion.\u00a0 Olivia can see that he is acting but for whatever reason she doesn\u2019t expose him for a phony when she has the chance.<\/p>\n
But much more seriously, she begins to suspect that Danny is the murderer and that he has the murdered woman\u2019s head in a locked hatbox that he keeps in his room.\u00a0 When the police inspector questions Danny about the murder and searches his room, he finds the hatbox and demands that Danny open it but Olivia intervenes and claims the box is hers and the Inspector relents.\u00a0 Now this seems inexplicable.\u00a0 She claims that she dislikes and distrusts Danny but for some reason she saves him.\u00a0 Later on, Danny tells her that she is actually attracted to him because of the excitement he has brought into her life.<\/p>\n
And indeed, Olivia is desperate for something to relieve the boredom of her hum-drum existence living with her aunt in this isolated rural environment.\u00a0 She longs for excitement and for that reason has rejected the marriage proposal of Justin Laurie who is her aunt\u2019s lawyer and an affectionate, dependable if unexciting suitor.<\/p>\n
But everything comes to a head and Olivia cracks under the strain of living in the house with the manic Danny and she flees to Justin\u2019s home leaving her aunt alone with Danny.\u00a0 Danny murders her and empties her safe of a large amount of cash.\u00a0 He prepares to burn down the house when Olivia returns and confronts him over the murder.\u00a0 He happily admits it and informs her that she too will be murdered and burned in the fire.\u00a0 But just then Justin arrives with the police and Danny has a final scene to declare his madness to himself in a hallway mirror before being carted away for justice.<\/p>\n
This is a very strange movie.\u00a0 My read is this is a woman\u2019s movie.\u00a0 Other than the murderer the main characters are all women.\u00a0 The lonely house in the woods reinforces this strange dynamic of women isolated with a sociopathic man who preys on women.\u00a0 But only Olivia has figured it all out.\u00a0 Mrs. Bramson is completely taken in.\u00a0 Dora and Emily can\u2019t make up their minds if he is real or not.\u00a0 But even Olivia is mesmerized by his tour de force.\u00a0 She knows he\u2019s a liar and she suspects that he\u2019s a murderer but she retains a sympathy for him that\u2019s hard to believe.<\/p>\n
I asked Camera Girl about this because she\u2019s a woman.\u00a0 I said, \u201cYou\u2019re a woman, is this possible?\u201d\u00a0 She said it could be somewhat believable that a woman who was so desperately bored might welcome the distraction of experiencing the weirdness of such a colorful character.\u00a0 So, we agreed that although the idea of Olivia helping Danny escape detection is sort of hard to believe, the movie was fairly interesting.<\/p>\n
Montgomery\u2019s portrayal of Danny and Russell\u2019s Olivia are fairly compelling characters.\u00a0 And the rest of the cast is very good too.\u00a0 As much as this movie is odd and the motif of Olivia allowing Danny to escape detection is far-fetched, nevertheless, I will still recommend this movie for people who like psychological dramas.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This is a very strange movie.\u00a0 Robert Montgomery plays Danny, a young man working at a hotel when a murder takes place.\u00a0 The police suspect<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[239,238,237],"tags":[190,1238,43,191,38,1355,3045,3046],"class_list":["post-14452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","category-classic-movie-reviews","category-reviews","tag-classic-movie","tag-hollywood-golden-era","tag-movie-review","tag-ocf-classic-movie-review","tag-review","tag-reviews","tag-robert-montgomery","tag-rosalind-russell"],"yoast_head":"\n