The New Pictures, May 13, 1946

A Stolen Life (Warner). “Man needs woman. Woman needs man. That’s basic.” This bit of twaddle is about the most intellectual statement in this sentimental restatement of Elizabeth Bergner’s 1939 film of the same name.

Bette Davis plays identical twins. As the Good Twin she falls in love with a pipe-puffing engineer (Glenn Ford). As the Bad Twin she steals him, pipe & all, marries him, manages to be spectacularly unfaithful. But the Good Twin stays staunch and true despite the Neanderthal attentions of an alarming artist (Dane Clark).

Fortunately for the story, while the sisters are sailing out a storm together, the Bad Twin is drowned. The Good Twin impersonates her sister, goes home to the engineer, but is found out before the Johnston Office can waggle a finger. Somehow, after all this, the stolen life is returned.

Only Bette Davis, by sincere overacting, gets this piece going at all; the rest of the cast is about as interesting as wet wash. A limp example: the uncle (Charlie Ruggles) who continually maunders, “Is there anything I can do?” Many cinemaddicts may yearn to snarl, “Yes. goaway!”

The Blue Dahlia (Paramount) and Her Kind of Man (Warner) are welcome throwbacks to a better, rougher day in movies. Before Hollywood had adjusted to talk without forgetting all the vivid lessons of silence, when none of the men in power had heard too much about literature, or movies as a white-collar art, and the sinister forces of Decency were still relatively quiescent, many vigorous, perceptive and entertaining movies were turned out. The best dealt with violence and skill—usually criminal—in big cities. Good examples: Public Enemy, Little Caesar, The Crowd Roars.

The Blue Dahlia serves this old wine in up-to-date glassware. Its story (by Raymond Chandler): a newly discharged veteran (Alan Ladd), suspected of his wife’s murder, goes up against most of the law & disorder in Hollywood before he discovers who killed her. The cynical crispness of atmosphere, character, and knowledge of the cold half-world, roughly approximated in films like Double Indemnity and Murder, My Sweet, has seldom been excelled since the early 1930s.

Best aspects: the tortuous, anarchic understanding of a bad world’s infinite mezzotints of menace and blackmail; the constant twitching of city lights; the icily skillful use of the personalities of Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake; the finely stylized, underplayed scenes involving Howard da Silva as a cabaret owner. Will Wright as a house dick, Walter Sande as a gunman.

Her Kind of Man, like so many Warner films, is less esthetically vivid, more earnestly aware of history and document. A return to the year before repeal, it tells the story of an egomaniac gambler (Zachary Scott), his girl (Janis Paige), and a columnist (Dane Clark) who refused to take no, or a beating, for an answer.

The picture involves: 1) a good deal of elaborate gangster talk, perhaps a trifle too redolent of dictionaries of cant; 2) a conscientious coverage of the key spots of the period (Chicago, Miami, Manhattan, Saratoga); 3) some appealing performances, notably those of Scott as the gambler, Newcomer Paige as his neatly pneumatic girl friend, and Harry Lewis as his rather clinically masochistic Man Friday.

But the picture almost grabs you by the lapels in its eagerness to furnish sociological motives for all the misbehavior (they seem to boil down to the old “I wuz hungry” theme), without making them stick. There are a few well-calculated bits of melodrama, too many shots like the conclusion: a self-conscious swing of the camera from a dead gangster to a sign—One Way Street.