Beware, My Lovely (The Filmakers, RKO, 1952)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Robin and Marian Turner Classic Movies showed an Eddie Muller “Noir Alley” presentation of the 1952 film Beware, My Lovely, which began life as a short story by writer Mel Dinelli called The Man, which was in turn based on a script Dinelli wrote in 1945 called “To Find Help” for the CBS radio series Suspense. The original radio show starred Agnes Moorehead as a World War I widow and Frank Sinatra, of all people, as the hired man she lets into her home who proceeds to terrorize her. Given that Moorehead had already starred in the Suspense drama “Sorry, Wrong Number,” in which a woman overhears a telephone call that lets her know her husband is seeking to have her killed, it’s not surprising she was cast in this type of role – though it is surprising that Sinatra, even this early, was exploring the sort of territory he would later bring to the big screen playing a potential Presidential assassin in the 1954 film Suddenly. The radio show was re-aired in 1949 with Ethel Barrymore as the victim and Gene Kelly as the psycho, though anyone who’d seen the 1944 film Christmas Holiday with Kelly and Deanna Durbin – not the bright, upbeat musical you’d expect from that title and cast but a dark, brooding film noir superbly directed by Robert Siodmak – wouldn’t have been surprised. In 1950 Dinelli adapted “To Find Help” into a short story called The Man and then a Broadway play which did well enough it attracted the attention of The Filmakers [sic]. The Filmakers was an independent production company founded by actress Ida Lupino and her then-husband, producer Collier Young, in the late 1940’s.

They began with a film called Not Wanted in which a woman gets pregnant by a seducer who then abandons her; she goes into what was then called a “laying-in hospital” and is pressured to give up her baby for adoption, then freaks out whenever she sees a baby on the street that resembles hers. Lupino and Young hired veteran silent-era director Elmer Clifton to direct Not Wanted, but he fell ill after a week and Lupino took over the direction herself. It did well enough that Lupino decided her future lay more behind the camera than in front of it, though with The Filmakers she divided herself between directing (including Outrage, a quite good movie with Mala Powers as a rape victim – even though under the Production Code they couldn’t use the word “rape” in the film and they had to call it “criminal assault” – and The Bigamist, with Edmond O’Brien as the title character and Lupino and Joan Fontaine as his two wives, the only film Lupino both directed and acted in) and acting. Alas, The Filmakers’ distribution contract was with RKO, and when Howard Hughes took over the studio and started throwing his weight around, Lupino and company got caught in the crossfire. Beware, My Lovely – a title oddly reminiscent of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, which a previous RKO management had taken off their film version and replaced with Murder, My Sweet because its star, Dick Powell, had previously been known for musicals and audiences seeing “Dick Powell in Farewell, My Lovely” assumed that it was another Dick Powell musical instead of a film noir masterpiece – was a title Hughes insisted on.

It takes place in 1918, as the U.S.’s participation in World War I was winding down, and Lupino plays Helen Gordon, a war widow (though we don’t realize that until midway through the movie; until then we assume her husband, “played” in a photo by William Talman – later the villain in Lupino’s greatest film as a director, The Hitch-Hiker, and still later the hapless prosecutor Hamilton Burger in the Perry Mason TV series – is merely serving in the war, not a casualty of it. She picks up a drifter at the railway station, Howard Wilton (Robert Ryan), and offers him a day’s work as a handyman and housecleaner. We already know all is not right with Howard because we’ve seen him in a prologue doing similar work for another woman whom he finds dead in one of the rooms in her house, though he seems genuinely surprised and at first we don’t know for sure if he killed her or just discovered her body after somebody else did. Once Helen lets Howard into her house, the film becomes another home-invasion story (though in the early 1950’s these weren’t yet the cliché they’ve become since) in which Howard is alternately disarming and crazy, veering between acting nice and doing scary things. Among the scary things Howard does is lock all the doors in Helen’s home and take away the keys so she’s locked in. He also rips out her telephone so she can’t call out for help and no one can call her, either. When a teenage girl, Ruth Williams (Barbara Whiting, songwriter Richard Whiting’s daughter and singer Margaret Whiting’s sister), comes over and alternately gripes about her parents having sent her to Helen’s to clean as punishment and sort-of cruises Howard (she’s a young girl in the full throes of early sexual awakening), comes over, Howard is upset and angry at her. Helen tries to trick Howard into leaving, saying that her roomer Walter Armstrong (Taylor Holmes) is returning the next day, but she’s “outed” by Mr. Franks (O. Z. Whitehead), who wanted Armstrong’s room for the two weeks Armstrong would be out of town.

Later a grocery boy comes over with a food delivery for Helen; though she usually pays her grocery bills all at once at the end of the month, she insists on writing him a check. Only Howard pays him off with $5 in cash ($5 for a whole week’s worth of groceries, even for one person? Isn’t inflation a bitch?) and then catches Helen in her bedroom, where she’d been writing a note on the back of the check saying she was in danger and asking the staff at the grocery store to call the police. Howard catches her writing the note on the check and uses that as an excuse not only to terrorize her but to attempt to rape her as well. Then a Mr. Stevens from the phone company (though he’s wearing a badge on his jacket that makes him look like a cop) shows up to investigate why Helen’s phone is out of order, and Helen takes Howard aside and persuades him to offer him a ride to the train station where they met. Only Howard sees through that, too, and when Stevens finally alerts the cops to what’s going on and they show up to arrest Howard, he slips back into the house and we’re pretty sure he’s going to murder Helen. Ultimately he leaves, but the cops don’t catch him and he goes free at the end, presumably to attempt this in another town with another unsuspecting victim too nice for her own good. There are some nice touches, like Helen’s dog Corky attacking Howard in the leg as soon as he shows up (one wants to yell at Helen, “Your dog knows this guy is bad news! Listen to him!”), and a later scene in which Howard tells Helen (and us) that he tried to enlist in the Army but was turned down for psychological reasons, which he resents.

Eddie Muller said in his outro that he didn’t like the film’s inconclusive ending, and he said if it were remade today Helen would have been played by Jamie Lee Curtis and it would have ended with her invoking supernatural powers and knocking him off. Actually it occurred to me that the most logical modern-day home for this story would be on Lifetime, and it would be pretty much the same except there’d be an epilogue in which Howard would turn up in another town doing the same thing to a different victim. Beware, My Lovely was directed by Harry Horner, who was mostly a production designer – he never directed another feature, though this one’s good and suspenseful enough it seems like he should have – and it benefits not only from the use of the leftover sets from Orson Welles’ mutilated masterpiece The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) – I’ve often argued that RKO amortized their losses on that film from the number of times they reused its sets – but Horner’s and cinematographer George E. Diskant’s adept use of the built-in capability for elevator-crane shots and overhead angles Welles and his production designer, Mark-Lee Kirk, had designed into the sets in the first place. Beware, My Lovely isn’t a great film by any means – maybe the plot situations seemed novel in 1952 but now they’ve been run into the ground – but it has one saving grace, the delicate performance by Robert Ryan. Most movie psychos seem normal until they suddenly go crazy and stay that way; what makes Ryan’s performance here especially sinister is his skill at flashing back and forth from seeming normality to psycho craziness and back. You really don’t know from scene to scene which he’s going to be, and the terror he puts Helen through comes from her inability to tell from moment to moment which he’s going to be and what’s going to set off his mood changes.