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BEWARE, MY LOVELY
Rating: 
USA. 1952.
Director – Harry Horner, Screenplay – Mel Dinelli, Based on his Story and Play The Man, Producer – Collier Young, Photography (b&w) – George E. Diskant, Music – Leith Stevens, Makeup – Mel Berns, Art Direction – Albert S. D’Agostino & Alfred Herman. Production Company – The Filmakers.
Cast:
Robert Ryan (Howard Wilkin), Ida Lupino (Helen Gordon)
Plot: Helen Gordon hires itinerant Howard Wilkin to help springclean her boarding house. But once in the house Wilkin, who is prone to complete memory lapses, becomes mentally unstable and makes Helen his prisoner.
This little-known film is an interesting and unusual psycho effort. Like any good thriller it confines itself to a finite, enclosed place – a boarding house – and with a series of manipulative lurches, compounds its situation around the manifestation of hopes and then their subsequent dashing. Perhaps director Harry Horner lacks an appreciable sense of irony – how Robert Ryan turns Ida Lupino’s pleas for honesty back on her after he discovers her lying to him, and how she unwittingly relaxes in safety locking the door with the key her own again unaware she has locked Ryan inside too – and seems a little too straightfacedly bland in the handling of these. But Horner’s style – menacingly hyping the suspense with sharply focused contrasts of fore– and back-ground, eerily underlit faces, memory reflections in buckets of water, Ryan’s end reappearance seen reflected off half-a-dozen mirrored Christmas baubles – is impeccable. Robert Ryan’s sallow, hesitant performance is a strangely sympathetic one.
Very few people have heard of Beware, My Lovely. The one quibble about it is its sense of place – it claims to be set in 1918 but the costumes are 1950s through and without the announcement one would never have guessed it was set 30 years earlier. Beware, My Lovely is also considerably better than the other film director Harry Horner made the same year – the hysterical God-lives-on-Mars anti-Communist rant Red Planet Mars (1952).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1999-2012
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