Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 1951, king vidor, lightning strikes twice
Director: King Vidor
An engaging late noir from the prolific King Vidor, Lightning Strikes Twice stars Strangers on a Train‘s Ruth Roman as a woman who seeks to prove that a released suspect convicted of murdering his wife is innocent. Like High Sierra, the picture raises tension and paranoia not in dingy back alleys, but in arid Southern ranches and atop canyons. Vidor and screenwriter Lenore J. Coffee teamed two years prior for Beyond the Forest, a preposterous melodrama remembered as being among the worst films that Bette Davis had ever starred in. Although the pair mostly gets things right with this effort, there are such missteps as a young, crippled boy who has a comically excessive dinner-table outburst about the nature of morality, only to be left so peripheral throughout the rest of the picture that he might as well be invisible. As damaging as such narrative tumors are, the casting of Richard Todd as the male lead was the biggest handicap. He evokes no sense of menace or mystery, which, as a murder suspect until the third act, is problematic. Zachary Scott shows up for a few brief scenes late in the film and plays a threatening slime-ball so well that he outshines Todd in every way. Additionally, although it wasn’t uncommon to hear inconsistent accents no matter the setting in this era of Hollywood, Todd’s British accent is completely distracting and ill-fit for the film’s aesthetic. Roman and Scott are worth watching, however, and especially the great Mercedes McCambridge, who plays the holdout juror that prevented Todd’s conviction.
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