Beautiful Stranger (1954)

Very best movie i ever watch

A brilliant film that helped define a genre

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

TWIST OF FATE is set on the French Riviera and could have been improved with color cinematography, but probably not by much. Its black and white images are not particularly striking and do little to enhance the film's Noir status. A businessman (Stanley Baker) is running a counterfeit operation not because he needs the money but simply because he's bored with big business. It doesn't seem very likely. He's also bored with his wife and is keeping a mistress (Ginger Rogers) in very high style. She, an ex-showgirl, is either naive enough or self-deceptive enough to think that he's going to divorce his wife to marry her. This would seem to be somewhat less unlikely. One of her old friends apparently has had a nervous breakdown and is in a hospital somewhere. This unseen woman's husband (Herbert Lom), a thoroughly lowdown weasel, coincidentally meets Rogers at a ritzy gambling casino despite the fact that he is broke. He also coincidentally is working indirectly as a part of Baker's counterfeiting ring. Baker eventually will mistake Lom for Rogers' lover. Lom may be mentally unbalanced himself right from the beginning of the movie; he certainly is by the end of it. When the necessity arises, Lom proves himself to be an excellent safe-cracker, which may be the most unlikely incident of the entire movie. If you're getting the idea that the plot of TWIST OF FATE is something less than airtight, you would be right. It would be rather churlish to suggest that the love affair between Ginger Rogers and Jacques Bergerac was unlikely given that they were married at the time. He was something like twenty years younger than she and moved on to another actress (Dorothy Malone, I think) after a few years. But movies, including this one, end long before that point is reached, and I suppose that it's just as well.As for performances, Rogers had seen better days, and for that matter would see better days in the future not only on stage but even in her few remaining film roles. Here this normally lively and sparkling actress comes across as quite ordinary, and such a passive role as 'Johnnie' simply doesn't become her. Baker is rather stiff, and as for the performance of the handsome but difficult to understand Bergerac, I'll quote Ginger's character from the movie ROBERTA: "I've seen worse, darling, but not much."By far the best thing in TWIST OF FATE is the performance of Herbert Lom. Despite the fact that his character is loaded down with absurdities and demonstrates no redeeming social values whatsoever, Lom makes him fascinating to watch in a 'How degraded can the poor fellow possibly be?' sort of manner. That and a snappy pace are the movie's two positive attributes. It's not a disaster, just a mediocrity.

Ginger Rogers stars with Stanley Baker and Herbert Lom in "Twist of Fate," a 1954 film shot on location in the Riviera. Even in black and white, the scenery is wonderful.Rogers is Johnny, an ex-showgirl living on the largesse of her sugar daddy Louis Galt (Baker), who's been separated from his wife supposedly for years and whose divorce will be final any minute. After a fight with him, she runs off and has a minor accident with her car. Going to the nearest house, she meets Pierre (Jacques Bergerac). (In real life, Rogers had the same reaction when she saw him as Dorothy Malone did - she married him.) Johnny and Pierre fall in love, and she wants to leave Louis. First of all, he's a criminal, though she's unaware of this; secondly, he's been lying to her, which she finds out the night of the accident; and thirdly, he turns out to have a violent streak. He announces that he won't let her leave.Louis sees that the diamond bracelet he gave her is in the hands of a con man (Herbert Lom) and thinks he's her lover. That's where the twist of fate comes in.Very derivative film, with Rogers excellent as Johnny, and with good performances by Baker and Lom, both scary in different ways.Jacques Bergerac was a handsome Fremchman, and that was about it. My mother once told me, "He was someone who married beautiful actresses." After he had married a couple of them and done some films, he became the head of Revlon's Paris office. Bless his heart, at 86, he's still with us.

Decent little thriller with an oddly cast Stanley Baker and hard-to-understand Jacques Bergerac, but the story is pretty good: about the mistaken identity of a thief amid the lies and deceptions of others.Ginger Rogers plays a third-rate performer who is shacked up with Baker, a wealthy businessman. They have a fabulous house in Cannes, and everything seems to me going well until an old acquaintance turns us (Herbert Lom) who seems to bring bad luck to anyone he associates with. Aside from that he is a thief. Rogers soon learns that Baker is really not separated from his wife (Margaret Rawlings) or divorcing her. He's also a crook. In a snit of hysterics, she almost drives her Rolls over a sea cliff and wanders to a funky beach house where she meets Bergerac. They fall in love. But how to get rid of Baker? Meanwhile, Lom robs the Cannes house and the diamond bracelet he steals ends up back with Baker, who gave it to Rogers. So he assumes Rogers and Lom are an item. From there everything goes wrong with botched killing attempts, escapes, and each person trying to figure out who is with who.Rogers looks great and acts imperiled well but beyond that has little to do in the finale as the men thrash it out on the sea cliffs. Lom turns in an excellent and subtle Peter Lorre like performance. Coral Browne steals the one scene she is in. Atmospheric and tense and not bad at all.

This is worth watching for the fine, understated performances by Stanley Baker and Herbert Lom, each of whom exudes menace: a coiled snake and a desperate weakling respectively. The story strains credibility to achieve its effects and keep the plot moving, notwithstanding its reliance on the familiar trappings of melodrama - e.g., greed, betrayal, characters who are not what they seem to be. For a "kept woman," Ginger Rogers displays remarkable innocence. And is it actually possible to open the combination lock on a wall safe by merely turning the dial slowly and listening for clicks? The picture is minor-league Hitchcock (without Hitchcock), and it shows.