Wikipedia classifies this 1951 domestic thriller as a melodrama, and here you can mostly understand that as meaning “about a woman.” Melodrama aims for the huge, tumultuous emotions of archetypal fears and fantasies writ large: Cause for Alarm may brush against some of the genre’s tropes, but it doesn’t share its aims. This isn’t about gasps or tears. This is a 74-minute panic attack.
And it’s a doozy of one. The film excels at conveying the sticky, almost unbearable friction of ordinary complications rubbing up against a character’s desperate and terrified tunnel vision. In fact, that is the movie: one woman on a frenetic, high-stakes quest to accomplish a perversely mundane task. You see, she needs to retrieve a letter she’s already mailed.
Loretta Young stars as Ellen, a devoted wife caring for her sick husband. When they met in the war, George Jones (Barry Sullivan) was an ace pilot—smooth and charismatic enough to quickly woo Ellen away from his friend, pining naval doctor Ranney Graham (Bruce Cowling). But those glamorous days are gone. Now they’re hip-deep in a suburban world of picket fences and chatty neighbors, and George has been laid low by an unpredictable heart condition. And while he lies in bed, his frustrated mind churns.
Ellen, he decides, is trying to kill him. She’s in cahoots with Graham, now their loyal family physician.
Cause for Alarm leaves some intriguing ambiguity about how sincerely George believes this. Sullivan gives excellent frenetic seethe, and he could be—as Graham fears—a sick man in the grip of a delusion. But maybe he’s choosing that delusion, letting it authorize his revenge, because he also gets a dark, disconcerting speech about a ship in a bottle he treasured when he was a child, one he stomped to pieces rather than surrender. Ellen is like that, he says: Graham may want her, but George will ruin her before he turns her over. He’ll ruin them both, even if he has to do it from beyond the grave. He’s written a letter to the district attorney, outlining all his suspicions—and it’s a letter Ellen innocently rushed out to their querulous postman just that morning.
Now George is dead, and the clock is ticking. Worse, Ellen is an ordinary woman caught in a nightmare; not only is she not a master criminal, she’s not even a very good liar. She’s not flawlessly smooth under pressure. She’s tap-dancing on the slippery edge of an abyss.
Cause for Alarm does a brilliant job tightening the screws on both her and the audience. One of its greatest strengths in that regard is surrounding the ever-more-agonized Ellen with well-observed minor characters who often feel like they’ve been plucked from a comedy: the world she’s supposed to be in, a world of nosy, passive-aggressive aunts and beleaguered mail carriers who whine about the heat and their pensions, spins on, but its jokes are now serious roadblocks. When there’s a dead body in your house, you can’t have someone casually appropriating your spare house key. When your life and freedom hinge on getting a letter returned to you, a comic relief figure being a stickler for rules and regulations is anything but funny.
This is all well-plotted and intense, and the movie even adds in some aching what-could-have-been musings: there’s a bittersweet, painful moment where Ellen—after suffering through a lot of loneliness because George never liked her talking to their neighbors—connects with the kindhearted woman next door, and she can’t know whether or not it’s already too late. Right now, the neighbor sees Ellen’s fraught distraction and reaches out to her. Will she be as sympathetic tomorrow, if word of that letter gets out?
None of this, though, would work without Loretta Young’s lead performance, enormous-eyed and luminous and practically gasping for air. This was one of Young’s final films before she largely made the jump to TV, and it’s all you need to want to see more of her.
Cause for Alarm! is streaming on Tubi, Hoopla, Fubo, and MGM+.
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Lauren James
Lauren James is a writer who wears many different hats (and pen names). She lives in Connecticut with her wife and two cats.
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Anthologized
A little slice of American folklore that feels like it's been here all along.
Streaming Shuffle
You make your royal bed, and you lie in it.
Anthologized
Alone in vast space and timeless infinity: one man in a ghost town.
Streaming Shuffle
A beautiful slice-of-life film that helped make a career.
Department of
Conversation
I straight up call this a noir. It has all the hallmarks of the genre – especially that tight, increasingly tense plot – it just has a very different aesthetic.
Yeah, it’s a noir plot in an unusual setting, which I’m always a sucker for. Very glad you recommended this one.
The author is someone I’m unfamiliar with but yhe strokes of the story feel right out of Cornell Woolrich.
What did we watch?
Hacks, Season Three, Episode Eight, “Yes, And”
This is interesting – what could I possibly say that the episode doesn’t adequately say itself? In fact, it’s something of a criticism I could have, because I was pleased with the outcome but fairly unsurprised by any of it, which is down to me overanalysing television to the point of deep understanding a show’s expectations and being on this show’s wavelength as much as anything. The one bit of subtext I could pull out was that Ava has kind of become what she previously would have decried – someone arguably making excuses for a ‘problematic’ older person, specifically because she can empathise with and understand her and see her as a person in a way that the college kids don’t really.
I do want to express irritation that this show was sold as a female anti-hero show about two women caught in a dark mentorship, making it sound like a lady Breaking Bad, when they’re more normal assholes than anything else, and they’re pretty much making each other better. I don’t think the creators were lying or falsely suggesting anything, nor was it people specifically here – the marketing around the show conveyed something different than what I got.
Deadbeat At Dawn — apparently streaming on Shudder, a wonderful channel, but this is quite possibly the most Tubi movie ever made. Film school student Jim Van Bebber took his scholarship money and just made a movie, a Death Wish/Warriors knockoff on the streets of Dayton, Ohio, which looks like the absolute shittiest place on earth in 1988, Van Bebber films in ass row houses and grungy streets and a train station that clearly didn’t mind him running around throwing gallons of fake blood on people. He also stars and if his character is weirdly written (his girlfriend is murdered, par for the course here, but his grieving reaction is to stuff her body in a trash compactor and squish it out of sight) and his acting not the greatest, he is doing shit for real, being a badass with nunchucks and repelling five stories down a building and, again, going nuts with gore. The scuzzy energy is off the charts, a stone classic of regional cinema, if I were a Dayton city official I would be trying to burn every copy in existence. And yes, it is on Tubi.
Le Cercle Rouge — “If I give [Alain] Delon a mustache, that’s it, he’s the man, not just a nice-looking young man but the man” — how, how is Jean-Pierre Melville still slept on, the man obviously knows everything you need to know about cinema*. I am not about to call this his masterpiece, although Army Of Shadows is so uniquely great it might need to stand off to the side, but it is excellent and to my eyes a darker riff on Le Deuxime Souffle, which I might prefer at this point but who knows. People change, except they don’t, is the premise of this film, which puts in Delon for Lino Ventura as the compelling heister and Bourvin for Paul Meurisse as the cop looking to take him down, and the casting offers an interesting change of its own. Ventura and Meurisse are more solid and cynical presences and known to each other from the start, Delon and Bourvin circle each other all film because of a second heister who Bourvin is chasing and Delon partners with (Gian Maria Volante) but do not have the same relationship. And while Delon is indeed the man and Bourvin is clever and even warm at times (he is the nexus of some magnificent Cat Content), they do not share their predecessors’ fatalism and that is strangely what makes the ending hit harder here. There is a half-hour heist, there are unspoken bonds between professional men, there are tests of loyalty running up against impossible situations — the cops do not stop and do not hesitate to create and work pressure points, all of this filmed with the blocking and distance that Melville seemingly so effortlessly choreographs, and then it all falls apart at the end and boy, those cops once again marching through the screen sure look like the Nazis in Army Of Shadows, don’t they? Melville loves crime, loves it enough to make sure his cops are worthy antagonists, and I think what he is doing at the ending is bringing in the bleakest of Hammett, when the Continental Op sees eye to eye with the Old Man. There is an Old Man here, bossing and bedeviling Bourvin, and the last shot shows what happens when you accept evil — others’ and your own — and accept that that is all there is.
*perhaps he knew too much, from the same interview as the first quote:
“I don’t know what will be left of me fifty years from now. I suspect that all films will have aged terribly and that the cinema probably won’t even exist anymore. My guess is that the final disappearance of cinemas will take place around the year 2020, so in fifty years’ time, there will be nothing but television.”
https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1079-melville-on-le-cercle-rouge
Cool French dudes are the man. Watching cool French dudes making and customizing bullets is cool. Crime is cool. Jazz is cool. Bleak endings are cool. Maybe the coolest movie.
The one pushback I have on this is that the jazz is stuck in these Playboy-ass dance clubs, I only know them through Melville’s depiction and they are incredibly unappealing to me, lots of stonefaced enjoyment of tedious dance routines. And here the women are not just costumed but coiffed and collected to be physically identical, one woman is 20 women is all women, apparently? As metaphor it is strong (and it underlines how there are no speaking parts for ladies here), as entertainment it is a total failure.
Yet one must also consider the film critics paradox: The French are funny, sex is funny, and comedies are funny, but Frrench sex comedies are never funny. (compliments of Matt Gruening)
Kojak, “A Question of Answers” – The sting operation gets messier, the Feds want to pull the plug, Kojak refuses since he is so sure they can get all the goods on the loan shark, and sure enough Eli Wallach is murdered. (On Columbo the big name guest is the killer. On Kojak the big name guest ends up dead.) For a while it really seems like Kojak is making bad decisions to go with his first bad decision but no, Kojak makes sure justice is satisfied. Pretty good season premiere, but man it makes hash of NYC geography in its big car chase. More familiar faces to report: Richard Herd as Jerry Orbach’s boss, and Matthew Arkin (Alan’s less famous son) as Wallach’s son.
Frasier, “Retirement Is Murder” – Early on, we’re told that Martin has been trying to solve a twenty year old murder mystery from his days as a cop. This time out, the case is broken! Not that Frasier really helps as much as he thought, since he is convinced that a trained chimp did it. And makes a fool of himself of course. Funny if fluffy, and honestly, I cannot believe that Frasier would ever ever call a chimp a “monkey.” And yet…
Doctor Who, “The War Games,” parts one through four – The TARDIS lands in what seems to be WWI no man’s land, but things are not as they seem. At ten parts, it’s the second longest single story (and the longest still extant), but so far it doesn’t feel that padded out. And for the era, this one is fairly well polished. Probably helps that there must have been a lot of WWI costumes at the Beeb.
Such a great serial. Like so many early Doctor adventures I came to it first through Malcolm Hulke’s novelization. So I had “the book is better than the movie” nostalgia once I finally saw it. But it’s still one of the best despite it’s length. Maybe the best TARDIS crew of the Classic era. Also the end of b&w filming. It may also be the most important serial in regards to Time Lord mythology influencing everything that came after it. It does look well polished. I think many of the Troughton serials were able to capture the Swinging London culture of the time. Not only in the costumes but what was happening artistically can be seen in the set designs.
While some of the Troughton serials (like most Doctor Who even at its best) has its ups downs, they are proving to be a lot better than I ever expected. (I have no idea why, but somehow the local PBS broadcasts never seemed to show the few Troughton serials we had so it’s new to me.) I suspect that between a bias against black and white, the long-missing episodes, and some form of recency bias, my initial Who fandom wasn’t giving Troughton and company the proper respect.
Yeah, our PBS only had Baker and later Doctors. I do remember seeing some Pertwee. But the show was on so late in my area I rarely caught a complete serial as a kid. Lots of single episodes. My primary source were the books. I didn’t catch any b&w Who until the VHS releases in the 90s.
The Shield, Season 4, “The Cure” through “Insurgents”
Usual sporadic notes:
– Dutch and Claudette breaking my heart at the beginning of this season, with Claudette’s iron refusal to offer the D.A. an apology she doesn’t mean vs. Dutch’s absolute unwillingness to write their partnership off and his increasing inability to handle his job and skills being sidelined: Karnes gets most of the heartbreak in the first few episodes (he’s been willing to suffer through these consequences with her, and she can’t even offer a meaningless gesture to get them both back to business as usual?), and then Pounder gives us all Claudette’s vulnerability in “Insurgents” (that she never thought Dutch would go behind her back like this, but that she’s also not willing to break over it). She couldn’t bend for him when he wanted her to, but he’s the only person she’ll really let run roughshod over her conscience and will, and she’s going to forgive him for it, and I love them.
– Relatedly, that poor guy with his three plants always makes my heart hurt. Not at all relatedly, but just to try to deaden the pain: “Just attack it. Like you’re hungry. Like the wolf.”
– Shane is always at his worst when he’s trying to do an impression of Vic: he doesn’t actually have Vic’s strengths, so he essentially just ambitiously overplays his own worst qualities: he is never more viscerally obnoxious than when he’s in his aggressive, extorting, entitled “Vice King” pose. (Also, Shane, don’t give yourself a nickname.) Shane at his best, on the other hand: that really tender scene with Jackson and postpartum Mara, where he’s stressed but sweet, reheating a baby bottle, getting ready to make Mara some lunch, and utterly unfazed about Vic seeing him in caretaker mode.
– The long shot of Angie’s death is an especially brutal choice, with no real cut to her to make it clear what’s about to happen. Almost a Shane-and-Army’s-eye view of it all, and horrific. (Made even more horrifying by Antwon’s face filling the frame at the end of the scene, all undeniable power and no mercy. Anderson is just terrific here.)
– And speaking of terrific one-season wonders: Glenn Close as Monica Rawling. I probably can’t say anything about her that Tristan’s recent article didn’t say already, but there’s such a fantastic watchful, powerful stillness to her. And–as, again, the article points out–it’s a great up-front strength that she’s genuinely in her people’s corner: her coming down hard on the assistant district attorney for exploiting Dutch’s need to get back in the game is a beautiful moment. And, in its own way, a very Claudette moment: a sense of “I don’t judge the way the world works” transitioning into “but now you’ve messed with my corner of it.” It’s one thing to sideline her detectives until you coerce a half-hearted apology, and it’s another thing entirely to mess with one of the Barn’s linchpin relationships and use her (terrible) pet program as leverage in the process.
– Excellent touch that Aceveda cannot fully and immediately trust Julien to stick with him in taking down the asset forfeiture program. As he says, they’ve been through this before.
– Love the Lem-Shane confrontation in “Insurgents,” where Shane is sincere about the fact that he wouldn’t have turned Angie over to Antwon (right before her death, he’s even aghast that Antwon killed her mom, which is a nice blink-and-you-miss-it beat) but that sincerity is inescapably muddled by 1) he’s so implicated in her death that he feels guilty anyway and, even more importantly, 2) he’s absolutely not sincere in denying that he’s in deep with Antwon. He’s telling the truth, and he knows it, but he’s also lying, and he knows that too–and Goggins plays at least part of it as him being genuinely shaken by realizing that this is what Lem thinks of him and he’s put himself in a position where he can’t even convincingly deny it. Lem won’t forgive Shane for all this + the end of S3 fight until later, but I feel like Shane takes the first step in forgiving him for burning the money here, and it’s not–because he’s Shane–a step grounded in any kind of rational thought, it’s purely that not being able to handle being the guy Lem hates makes him realize he still loves Lem anyway.
– Random SPOILER bit: Vic trying to get assigned control of Rawling’s gang unit has a hilarious-in-light-of-the-whole-series bit where he desperately says, “Ronnie can handle the Garage Sting!” Me: “Man, why are you throwing Ronnie under the bus? … Wait, I’ve seen the whole series, why is this surprising me?” Anyway, to be fair to be Vic, Ronnie is in fact the only member of the Strike Team who could peaceably accept watching a bunch of surveillance videos as his job. I’m sure he’d still like the occasional chance to get outside, though. And again, in light of everything, ow.
Yup, that’s one of my favorite Shane scenes ever. You could see him in a different life as a stay at home dad and one who’s not ashamed of it.
Definitely one of my favorites too, and completely agreed on how it makes it so (heartbreakingly) easy to imagine a different, better life for him.
Love Hurts – Maybe my expectations were cratered by the abysmal reviews, but I had fun with this. It’s one of those early year movies that aims to get you in and out of the premise as fast as possible, maybe a bit too fast (much like dumping ground classic I.S.S., curiously also featuring Ariana DeBose). It approaches its story with the assumption that you’ve already seen the preview, or like any other movie in the last twenty years – ordinary guy is actually a professional killer, blah blah blah. The important thing is Ke Huy Quan starts doing early Jackie Chan within the first five minutes of the movie’s 83-minute runtime. His job is to distract from the not-ready-for-theatrical supporting cast, aside from DeBose and an amusing Marshawn “Beastmode” Lynch fresh off stealing scenes in Bottoms.
Unfortunately, the movie only occasionally relies on Quan the way it should. And the lack of time spent on character – and moreso the director’s lack of facility with story, pacing, actors, humor and pretty much anything other than stunts – kills the movie dead as a nameless henchman for a loooong middle section. It revives a bit in the final stretch and it’s tempting to celebrate the movie for what it does right – note the relatively short credits with a large crew of stunt performers – even though the best parts mostly emphasize how much better the whole could have been.
This is another in a trend of movies by stuntmen-turned-director doing right by other stunt men. Love Hurts doesn’t have the technical chops of the John Wick nor its psychopathy (rude treatment of a Property Brother aside). It lacks the charisma of The Fall Guy but also its flop-sweat desperation. You take victories where you can get them in February.
American Dad!, “O Brothel, Where Art Thou?”
Stan gets jealous when Greg’s house is picked by the Langley Falls Historical Society as a historical place of note, so he cooks up a story about their house being a colonial brothel– in true Stan fashion, over the objections of his family who absolutely do not give a shit, and eventually get sick enough of having their lives put on display that they leave.
There’s also a runner where Jeff keeps spending Hayley’s money on fishing worms, and a C-story where one of Roger’s characters finds an old truck he jacked, with a bunch of 1987 Encyclopedia Britannicas. So Roger decides to get into salesman character, gets mostly treated like you’d expect, and then after finally getting his foot in the door of an old lady’s house, spends several days with her trying to convince her to buy a set.
Poppa’s House, “Slumber Party”
This episode seems to be more about families manipulating each other, but I don’t mean that in a pejorative way. Junior is having a sleepover with the kids and some family, and Poppa doesn’t want to go, and they both know it. Junior thinks he can psychologically manipulate Poppa with his “inception” technique, but Poppa is wise to his tricks, since Junior learned it from him in the first place.
A slight, goofy, but fun one. Also, Nina is on some work retreat and Charo shows up. I’m not sure why, other than someone said “We can get Charo!” and the oldest person in the CBS network executive meeting said “I know who that is!”
Also, one of my friends just finished up The Shield, so I watched “Possible Kill Screen” and “Family Meeting” along with him. He has… different ideas on who Vic is than I do.
Let’s Start A Cult – Streaming Shuffle/FOTI gets results once again! 90 incredibly funny minutes, with one just amazing editing cut to the funniest handjob since The Favourite. I have a friend who was raised in a cult, and while I’d never, ever tell her to watch this movie, it does a good job as Ruck and Lauren said of balancing WHY people would join a cult vs. the unhealthy, fucked up power dynamics inherent to a cult. (The character of William being a manipulative jerk where the others are kind-hearted weirdos also makes him a great straight man, trying to cajole them while repeatedly undercut by Chip’s dumbassery.) What I mean is the movie knows cult members join these things out of loneliness or a need for community, and still gets huge laughs out of the likes of “celery bones” and one very demented monologue near the end.
Serial Mom – More results! A good time though the last act in court wore out it’s welcome. Will never think of “Daybreak” or Suzanne Somers the same way. Both Kathleen Turner and Sam Waterston commit to the innate weirdness of their characters too. Waters gets deeper than Burton with the suburban satire because he subtly depicts ways everyone is transgressing, breaking the law, or enacting some mild sadism. The darkness is at the corners and the center, not underneath.
I score a double! (Well, more like Nath continues to score on originally recommending Let’s Start a Cult.) So glad you liked these, and great point about the weirdness and darkness surging beneath all of suburbia in Serial Mom: the garbagemen enthusiastically, viscerally wishing for the non-recycling neighbor’s death is a great example.
The specificity of their complaints is so very Waters. “Millions in taxpayer dollars wasted!”
“When your life and freedom hinge on getting a letter returned to you, a comic relief figure being a stickler for rules and regulations is anything but funny.”
This is so much more stressful than simple black comedy, which says cruel things are funny — instead, funny things are cruel, and the lack of cruel intention just makes it more unbearable. This sounds great and Young is a person I need to spend more time with, she’s excellent in Man’s Castle.
Oh, it’s incredibly stressful. And that’s a great point about the distinction between this and black comedy–it’s something that ratchets up the tension, too, because the protagonist also can’t afford to respond like the characters are being even unintentionally cruel, not without giving away that the stakes are higher than they should be.
Year of the Month update!
And March is going to be Silent Era Month, where you can join these writers in examining your favorite silent movies and anything else from the 1910s and ’20s!
Mar. 4th: Lauren James: The Most Dangerous Game
Mar. 10th: Sam Scott: The Passion of Joan of Arc
Mar. 20th: Cori Domschot: Steamboat Bill, Jr.
Mar. 24th: Tristan J. Nankervis – Birth of a Nation
Mar. 26th: Sam Scott: Peter and Wendy by J.M. Barrie
Mar. 27th: Lauren James: The Well of Loneliness
Mar. 31st: John Anderson: The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog
Here’s how we’re wrapping up February:
Feb. 25th: Bridgett Taylor: Rogue One
Feb. 27th: Cori Domschot: Hidden Figures
Feb. 27th: John Bruni: Jet Plane and Oxbow
And in April, we’ll be movin’ on up to 1999, so you can write about any of these movies, albums, books, et al!
Maybe it’s just me, but Loretta Young looks like Marie Windsor in this film, which would go a long way towards explaining why Barry Sullivan thinks his wife is trying to kill him.