Walk Softly, Stranger (Vanguard Films, RKO, 1948, released 1950)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Afterwards my husband Charles and I stayed on TCM for two more films, including a showing on Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” program of a problematic movie called Walk Softly, Stranger. It was made in 1948 as a co-production between RKO and David Selznick’s Vanguard Films, and it co-starred Joseph Cotten and Alida Valli (the Italian actress Selzhick signed and billed only as “Valli,” hoping to duplicate the one-named success of “Garbo”). It was based on a story written by two young scribes named Manuel Seff and Paul Yawitz, though the actual screenplay was by old RKO hand Frank Fenton (and reflects his penchant for morbid wisecracks), and according to Muller’s introduction Selznick originally commissioned it for Alfred Hitchcock as director and Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman as stars, hoping to repeat the success of Notorious (an earlier RKO-Vanguard co-production and an enormous hit). Unfortunately, Hitchcock turned it down and Selznick put him on The Paradine Case instead (an old story by Robert Hichens which Selznick had wanted to do in his MGM dais with Garbo, only Garbo turned it down because she refused to play a murderess and the film ultimately co-starred Charles Laughton, Gregory Peck and Ann Todd, and was Valli’s first American film and a major box-office flop). So Selznick then hired the other leading British director of the 1930’s, Robert Stevenson, and put Cotten and Valli into the leads because they were both under contract to him.

The film went before the cameras in 1948 under the title Weep No More, only it got mangled in the cutting room, new scenes were shot and ultimately the film was shelved. In the meantime Howard Hughes bought RKO in 1948 and did nothing with the film until two years later, when he saw the enormous success of Cotten’s and Valli’s next film together, The Third Man (a masterpiece, nominally directed by Carol Reed but definitely showing the influence of its third star, Orson Welles) and decided to release it as the second Cotten-Valli collaboration. Since Hughes was notorious for tinkering with movies he produced and often screwing them up in the process, critics generally assumed that the obviously tacked-on ending was his work – but it was actually Selznick’s. It wasn’t the first time Joseph Cotten had starred in an RKO movie with an ending that got butchered with editing and retakes – can you say The Magnificent Ambersons? – and Eddie Muller recalled a 2008 screening in which he showed Walk Softly, Stranger to a roomful of hard-core noir fans who were expecting a newly rediscovered masterpiece, only to turn against the film when that ending came on.

Walk Softly, Stranger casts Cotten as Chris Hale – or at least someone who calls himself Chris Hale – who comes to the fictitious small town of Ashton, Ohio claiming to have grown up there. He rents a room from a widow named Mrs. Brentman (Spring Byington’s, Hollywood’s all-purpose mother figure) in what he calais is the house he grew up in. Mrs. Brentman is all alone in the world – her husband died of a heart attack and their son was killed in combat in World War II – and she takes a maternal interest in her mysterious boarder. Chris also gets a job in a local factory owned by A. J. Corelli (Frank Puglia) and falls in love with Corelli’s daughter Elaine (Alida Valli). Elaine was permanently disabled in a skiing accident in Europe years before and she’s convinced no man will want an ongoing relationship with her. Unfortunately, some of Chris’s old underworld associates show up in Ashton and get him to join them in a casino robbery in a nearby town. One of them, Whitey Lake (Paul Stewart, reuniting him with Cotten from the cast of Citizen Kane), holes up ini Mrs. Brentman’s remaining bedroom and Chris puts him up on condition that he agrees to stay in the room 24/7 and never go out. Alas, Whitey blows the whole thing and ultimately the other members of the casino robbery gang ambush Chris and shoot him with three bullets in the back.

That’s where the story originally ended, with Chris’s fate left ambiguous as to whether he lived or died, but that wasn’t good enough for David O. Selznick. He tacked on a weird ending in which Chris is hospitalized and then transferred to state prison, with a tearful parting scene in which Elaine promises to wait for him and reunite with him as soon as he’s released. The critical consensus now, if not then, was that this ridiculous ending wrecked Walk Softly, Stranger and kept it from achieving classic status, but I disagree. I think Walk Softly, Stranger was doomed from the beginning; it’s just a romantic melodrama with no more than a few hints of noir, and Cotten’s character is so maddeningly enigmatic we’re not sure whether he’s the real Chris Hale or what his motives are. Is he a crook after Mrs. Brentman’s fortune from the get-go, or a basically honest man trying to escape the criminal mistakes of his youth? Also neither the ambiguous ending Messrs. Stevenson, Seff, Yawitz and Fenton intended nor the tacked-on one Selznick supplied have the unforgettable poignancy of the heart-rending leave-taking of Cotten’s and Valli’s characters in The Third Man.