TCM’s Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at Midnight and 10 a.m. ET is Harry Horner’s Beware, My Lovely (1952) with Ida Lupino, Robert Ryan, Taylor Holmes and Barbara Whiting

By David in TN
friday, december 15, 2023 at 5:56:00 p.m. est

TCM’s Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at Midnight and 10 a.m. ET is Harry Horner’s Beware, My Lovely (1952) with Ida Lupino, Robert Ryan, Taylor Holmes and Barbara Whiting.

Film Noir Guide: “A paranoid-schizophrenic handyman (Ryan) hops a freight train after killing a housewife and lands a job with homeowner Lupino in a nearby town. He isn’t on the job five minutes before he starts behaving strangely, turning the widow’s Christmas holiday into a film noir nightmare.

“Holmes plays Lupino’s boarder and Whiting is her annoying teenage niece. Although Ryan is chilling, and Lupino is convincing enough, Beware is a bit dated, managing only an occasional fright. The film was based on the successful Broadway play The Man, which starred Dorothy Gish.”

David in TN: The crypto-communist Robert Ryan made a living playing the most negative characters Hollywood of that time could conjure up. Ryan sometimes had positive roles but is remembered for psychos, bigots, Western villains, etc. One of his last roles had Ryan plotting to assassinate JFK. Robert Ryan’s friends claimed he was such a nice guy off screen.

N.S.: The Film Noir Guide’s Michael F. Keaney blew it this time. When he says “Beware is a bit dated,” that’s a vacuous criticism. If Beware, My Lovely is a bit dated, so is every other of the 700 pictures in his book, which was published in 2010. After all, the age of so-called film noir, which he acknowledged in his title (“1940-1959”), ended in 1959. I think that irrelevant criticism was just filler.

I saw this picture a few years ago, not via Red Eddie, and it was spine-tingling throughout. It was an RKO cheapy (or was that redundant?), but you couldn’t go wrong with Lupino or Ryan, and together…. (See their previous pairing, Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground (1951), a beauty-and-the-beast exercise, in which she plays a feisty, orphaned blind lady living out in the sticks an hour or two north of the city, and he (1909-1973) plays a near-psycho New York City police detective. He’s loaned out to the local police chief (Ian Wolfe), in order to give him a break, and a last chance to save his career. Her mentally retarded kid brother, on whom she’s dependent, is the suspect in the murder (and rape?) of a teenaged girl. Ward Bond is the vic’s father, who seeks to avenge his daughter.)

Whiting is much more than “annoying,” as the teenaged niece. She’s vicious.

Lupino (1918-1996) had been a contract player with Warners (the “crashout” crime picture, High Sierra, 1941), but tired of being fourth on the conga line, behind Bette Davis, Olivia deHavilland, and Anne Sheridan, and so she decamped to RKO, which was a cross between a big studio and Poverty Row, and where although the money was worse, the opportunities were better. At RKO she acted, wrote scripts, and directed.

Ryan was for a time with Robert Mitchum what passed for a star at RKO.

Late in Ryan’s career, he sought out roles as likeable murderers, which led to some odd performances. In The Wild Bunch, he played a snobby career criminal, Deke Thornton, and in Executive Decision (1973), a conspiracy-theory movie claiming the CIA assassinated President Kennedy, he played a kind-hearted, presidential assassin.

During The War, Ryan was, like his enemy, patriot John Wayne, a shirker, but Ryan got himself a fancy shirking job, stateside, as a U.S. Marine Corps boxing coach.

Robert Ryan never retired from acting. He was a smoker, and the Big C, or what John Wayne called “the Red Witch,” got him in 1973.