Lightning Strikes Twice (1951)

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Wow, this is a REALLY bad movie!

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

After getting an Oscar nomination for The Hasty Heart, British actor Richard Todd did a few more American films before returning to the United Kingdom. Some like A Man Called Peter were top rate and some like Lightning Strikes Twice fall right apart at the beginning. There is no way that Mercedes McCambridge would ever have gotten on a jury where Todd was the defendant. In this case he was being tried for murder. She was the holdout on the jury that swung the case to acquittal by reasonable doubt. As someone who knew the defendant that is impossible.McCambridge is the reason to see this film, her intense style of acting carries it over a lot of rough patches, but not enough. Ruth Roman on vacation for her health gets involved in the local controversies where Todd's arrest and trials for murdering his tramp of a wife are the number one subject of local gossip. Roman stays at a dude ranch run by Mercedes and her brother Darryl Hickman. And she falls for Todd, but soon the doubts appear.Zachary Scott is on hand as well in a surprisingly small role as a rather sleazy playboy. Scott is always good, we should have seen more of him.Lightning Strikes Twice has not worn well over the years.

This is a superb King Vidor film noir, made only two years after his ultimate masterpiece, THE FOUNTAINHEAD (1949). Unless one considers the sultry RUBY GENTRY (1952) a film noir of sorts, Vidor was not really a noir director. But this film shows that when he needed to become one, he could do it in the twinkling of a lens. The female lead in this film was that very fifties woman, Ruth Roman, who appeared in film after film in those days. Seeing her now, she is so much 'then' as a type, that one cannot imagine her in a contemporary setting at all. All of her mannerisms and assumptions positively reek of the Eisenhower Era. The mesmerising performance of Richard Todd is what really makes this film work. His eyes blaze with ambivalent intensity, like two searchlights, as he stares at Ruth Roman and we and she try to guess is he a good guy or a bad guy. Whatever he is, he feels it deeply. Zachary Scott, in sinister lecherous mode, is Todd's friend, or at least Todd thinks he is. Scott keeps 'lech-ing' round Ruth Roman, can't keep his eyes off her, and that goes for his hands too. She's having none of it, because she's a straight fifties gal. The film has a strong, tormented performance from Mercedes McCambridge, in only her fifth role. She had commenced her film career in the hit ALL THE KING'S MEN (1949) only two years earlier, and five years after this she was to play perhaps her best known role of all in GIANT (1956) with James Dean. She was generally considered one of the finest actresses of her generation, which is hardly surprising, since she was originally one of Orson Welles's Mercury Theatre team, and most of them were brilliant. Mercedes was her second name, but she used it as her first, and was called 'Mercy'. In this film, Rhys Williams plays a priest named Father Paul, who is sickly and sanctimonious and likes to call grown-ups condescendingly 'my child'. (Don't over-pious, patronising priests like that make you sick, especially when they have pet Hispanics hanging around to prove how broad-minded they are?) This film is set way out West somewhere, where the desert is threatening. But so are some of the people! This murder mystery is a twister, and it wriggles like a rattler.

This is a bit of a rum do and no mistake. For a start we have the solid mahogany Richard Todd leaving a trail of sawdust in his wake whilst Zachary Scott who can and does act Todd off the screen doesn't even appear until about reel #6 and is woefully under extended. Ruth Roman might have done really well as the femme lead - if she wasn't in the same movie as Mercedes McCambridge - things are tough all over, it would seem. Plot-wise it's as hokey as they come; we open with Todd on Death Row on account of a little matter of murdering his wife then, with no groundwork/back-story to help us he is awarded first a stay of execution and then a re-trial which leaves him a free man. Enter Ruth Roman, actress on vacation/convalescence who falls instantly into fascination with Todd. This leads nicely to the 'doubting' scene, did he REALLY do it, will he do the same to Me, until all is resolved neatly with the real killer not only being unmasked but also paying the ultimate price. This is noir-lite with two excellent performances from Scott and McCambridge, a solid one from Roman and Todd having a laugh.

Richard Todd sits on death row, waiting execution for his wife's murder. At the eleventh hour, a reprieve and new trial come through; he's acquitted, thanks to one holdout juror (Mercedes McCambridge). Released, he disappears into the west Texas desert. Enter Ruth Roman, a touring actress in search of the desert's restorative climate. An innkeeper and his wife become solicitous of her when she stops in a small town, and lend her a car to get to the dude ranch where she hopes to recuperate. En route (in a scene prescient of Janet Leigh's flight from Phoenix in Psycho), she gets lost in thunderstorms and takes refuge in an abandoned house -- where Todd is holed up. They size one another up and, next morning, she continues on to the dude ranch. Run by McCambridge and her emotionally disturbed young brother (Darryl Hickman), it has closed down, but they agree to put Roman up for a few days. But she seeks out Todd again, despite conflicting stories about his guilt or innocence. Director King Vidor and scriptwriter Lenore Coffee, having goaded Bette Davis to pull out all the stops in Beyond The Forest two years earlier, here take on another overloaded melodrama, with mixed results. We see too little of key events and rely instead on hearsay about other characters, who sometimes haven't yet been sufficiently established (and the one brief flashback is a mistake -- we need either more or none). And of eight major characters, two or even three (including Zachary Scott) prove superfluous. But the movie's biggest stumble lies in the casting of Richard Todd. Remembered if at all as the title character in that echt-1950s biopic of pious patriotism A Man Called Peter, here his stiff British accent and acting falsify the whole Southwestern milieu (Lightning Strikes Twice, like Desert Fury of five years earlier, evokes the new Sunbelt of money and leisure). Happily, the female characters fall on the plus side. Kathryn Givney shows spunk and intelligence as the strangely solicitous Mrs. Nolan. Ruth Roman, on evidence of this movie and Tomorrow Is Another Day, had more range and subtlety than she was let display in her best known role as Farley Granger's mannikin-like fiancee in Strangers on a Train. But the acting honors, inevitably, fall to McCambridge. Looking especially tomboyish, her face registers every thought and feeling that passes through her head; she's hyper-alert in her moods and responses. And so, as was her custom during her disappointingly thin screen career, she delivers the most memorable performance of the film.