Walk Softly, Stranger (1950)

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MissGoddess
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Walk Softly, Stranger (1950)

Post by MissGoddess »

Thanks to Ollie I got to see this movie again after so long. It was one of my favorite
love stories. it was the first movie I saw starring Valli and I still like her best in this,
much better than in The Third Man (don't all you filmnoiristas kill me!). Actually, this
movie is rather different to how I remember it, much darker. In fact, I believe it could
be considered a +film noir+ after all and hence my impertinence in posting this here. :P
And the love story is astonishingly subdued and
unsentimental ( :( ). I do love it though, so ignore my frownie face. It's got a crackly
script with some really sharp dialogue and Joseph Cotten is his most attractive.
He's perfect, as always, playing a man burdened by something eating him inside,
in this case it's a dark past. The movie rather reminds me of Shadow of a Doubt and
Preminger's *Fallen Angel*, in that we have a "hero" who is not one, coming into a
"typical American suburban type town" trailing all his city badness along with him. And
of course, a nice girl falls for him. Only this nice girl has baggage of her own, he may
have been wounded on the inside by the war but she lost her ability to walk by fooling
around on a ski slope (what in the world makes people want to do such things?). Everyone
in the movie is "damaged" by something or suffering some loss which adds to the "noir" vibe.

At the helm is Robert Stevenson, who directed a couple of nicely atmospheric dramas such as
Jane Eyre (with considerable Wellesian input) and Woman on Pier 13 (I want to see that
again!) before turning to Hitchcock's TV show and Disney. Spring Byington is unvarnished and
unaffectedly agreeable as the widowed landlady who takes Cotten in and sort of adopts him in
place of the son she lost in the war. Paul Stewart is on hand as a scurvy remnant of the past
Cotten is trying to escape.

I hope this movie can be rediscovered, it deserves to be.
"There's only one thing that can kill the movies, and that's education."
-- Will Rogers
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