The New Pictures, Feb. 23, 1948

A Double Life (Universal-International). By popular tradition, all good actors “live” their parts.* Matinee Idol Anthony John (Ronald Colman) loses himself in his roles more thoroughly than most. Fortunately, he never plays Macbeth; it’s dangerous enough when he becomes Othello.

For years he has been on loving terms with his ex-wife (Signe Hasso), who plays Desdemona. But as he settles down into a long run, and really gets hold of his role, it takes an ever tighter hold on him. He begins to suspect his pressagent (Edmond O’Brien) of being a backstage Cassio. He also experiences some sickening sideslips into full loss of identity. The company becomes more & more nervous about the frightening sincerity with which he plays his strangling scene with Desdemona. Will he finally go completely bats and commit murder?

This rather florid drama is written with considerable Broadway sleekness by Garson Kanin and his wife, Actress Ruth Gordon, and is appropriately directed by George Cukor. It offers Signe Hasso her best chance to date to prove that her beauty and talent deserve better roles than she usually gets; Newcomer Shelley Winters makes a sure hit as a waitress.

Ronald Colman’s role is a wonderfully rich present to an actor who is celebrating his 28th year in movies. In all its blends and alternations of darkness & light and of classical, romantic and modern styles, the part is an actor’s dream. Colman sits down to it as a veteran gourmet might sit down to the banquet of a lifetime, and polishes it off, savoring every last morsel, straight through to the crumbs on the tablecloth. His performance is a pleasure in itself, but the real delight is to watch his delight in his job. Colman is not a great actor, but he gives an arresting demonstration of what a good actor can do with great material when he cares enough for it. And in his non-Shakespearean sequences he makes the most of the particular grace, charm and likableness which have been his unique contribution to movies.

. . .

Ronald Colman owes his screen career—or its beginning, anyhow—to the quick judgment of another movie veteran, Director Henry King. King spotted Colman on Broadway in 1922 (supporting Ruth Chatterton and Henry Miller in La Tendresse), and gave him the male lead opposite Lillian Gish in The White Sister (1923). Since Miss Gish became a nun in the picture, all Colman could do was look frustrated, but he did that so handsomely that his movie career was assured. During the middle and late ’20s he and the late John Gilbert ran neck & neck as Hollywood’s foremost leading men. Gilbert had the edge on heavy-breathing love scenes and Colman on elegance and versatility. Colman was equally proficient in beglamored melodrama (Beau Geste, which he still considers his best picture) and in drawing-room comedy (the late Ernst Lubitsch’s silently epigrammatic version of Lady Windermere’s Fan).

The talkies brought disaster for John Gilbert, but Colman, with his light, deft, British diction and his stage training, was one of the best-prepared people in Hollywood. He gave to Bulldog Drummond, one of the first thoroughly engaging talkies, most of its charm; he played Arrowsmith and several of the big traditional romantic roles (If I Were King, Tale of Two Cities, Prisoner of Zenda). When he grew a little old for young romance, his cultivated accent still fitted him for radio work—notably as a frequent guest on Neighbor Jack Benny’s program.

Colman is known as one of the wisest self-managers in pictures. When his longterm contract with Sam Goldwyn expired over 13 years ago, he turned down rich contract offers from every major studio in the business, in favor of free lancing. He has handled the Colman career far better than any studio could have. He has carefully selected his scripts (about one in every 25 offered), his directors and his leading ladies; he has paced himself to a one-a-year schedule; he has not burned himself out at the box office, or buried himself in a type or picture rut. He makes very sure he gets a good role for himself, but he makes even surer that he gets a good all-round story and screenplay. He explains, shrewdly: “A man is sunk unless he retains the amateur in himself. You cannot get too professional—too intent on making money. You have got to have some of the enthusiasm, some of the eagerness of the amateur. And may I modestly say that I have this.”

Secret Beyond the Door (Universal-International) will not be divulged here, but prospective ticket buyers should get a fair warning.

Joan Bennett marries Michael Redgrave, a patrician who is also, as becomes gradually clear, something of a loon. He has made a collection of “felicitous” rooms. —i.e., reproductions of rooms in which notorious murderers have done away with women; and he seems rather tetchy about women, himself. There is one room he won’t show, even to Joan. When she satisfies her fearful curiosity, she gets a shock that the audience may in some mild degree share.

This is another of those shows in which all mysteries are eventually explained—and all sins forgiven—by half-baked psychoanalysis. Fritz Lang is a gifted director but, except for a few well-calculated whiffs and jabs of fright and his customary talent with sinister interiors, he hasn’t much chance with this material.

A moot question for sociopsychologists: Why in this mother-conscious nation, where mamma’s boys are fairly common, is the type portrayed by the versatile English actor Michael Redgrave (here and in Mourning Becomes Electro)? Thus far in his U.S. career, Redgrave has been given nothing else to play.

* Some do; others are completely detached from them. The celebrated Polish Tragedienne Helen Modjeska was able to jerk tears from spectators by reciting the alphabet.