A Double Life

source: A Double Life

Trailer—A Double Life

A Double Life

If you like "Othello," you'll love this flick since half the movie revolves around the stage production of the play. The film has a great cast with Signe Hasso and Shelley Winters as the women in Colman's life while Edmond O'Brien plays the enterprising press agent. A couple of the supporting players I particularly liked were Millard Mitchell as the grizzled reporter who finds an angle and Joe Sawyer, the 1940's answer to Drew Carey, who plays the cop on the case. Great raw moments in this one with noir realism throughout.

An unstable stage actor has trouble separating his roles from real life, leading to tragic consequences. Colman won an Oscar for this because this is the type of showy performance that the Academy loves. It is not the actor's best performance, although the problem may be with the role as written, of a silly Jekyll & Hyde personality. Hasso fares better as his long-suffering companion, and a slim Winters looks very nice as a waitress. It has good cinematography and score, but the script is dull, melodramatic, and contrived. Cukor doesn't help matters with his hammy direction. Too much screen time is devoted to scenes from "Othello," making the film quite tedious.

Man, this gets a lot of good reviews in the review books. Frankly, I found it too slow and unappealing right from the start. I kept waiting for it to pick up a little steam but that never happened. This movie is vastly overrated. Shakespeare, with the King James English, has never appealed to me, anyway, so it may just be me. There is a fair share of the latter in the first half of the film as they show Ronald Colman playing the role of Othello. The good points of the film include - thanks to a restored print - some decent cinematography and a young, slim and attractive Shelly Winters. Overall, this is simply too boring, too much repetition in some of the scenes to watch again. Besides, we all know that most actors are nut-cases, anyway, but kudos to Hollywood for demonstrating it here in this story.

George Cukor directs a brooding and cynical classic. The distinctive Ronald Coleman is at his best in this piece of Noir about an actor who loses himself in his roles. The acclaimed Anthony John(Colman)has driven his wife Brita(Signe Hasso)away with his highly fueled temper and erratic behavior. But the two manage to continue working together to please their audiences. Things begin to change as John is becoming bored with his career; he reluctantly agrees to play Othello. He gets deep into character as a jealous and murderous man. He begins walking a thin line between illusion and reality and ends up confusing his role with his own life and eventually kills his mistress(Shelley Winters),but has no memory of the dastardly deed. Colman seems faultless in this role. Winters is very impressive as the young woman determined to get away from her squalid life. Also in the cast: Edmond O'Brien, Ray Collins, Joe Sawyer and Whit Bissell.

I stumbled on this late last night n TCM. Hadn't seen it since it came out originally, but had never forgotten it. I had completely forgotten how gorgeous and talented Signe Hasso was when she was still young, ditto for Shelly Winters before she balooned out. Ronald Coleman, though, was the quintessential state actor of his time - I had read Othello in high school English - and HATED it. After seeing "A Double Life" I read it again and finally understood what the play was about. The Gordon/Kanin writing team was at its peak when this script was done - A movie well worth remembering and rewatching,

Colman gives one of his greatest performances of his career and won an Academy Award as a Shakesperean actor whose off stage life imitates his theater role of Othello where he kills a woman he believes to be Desdemona. Electrifying suspense, laced with crackling dialogue and melodrama. Winters, in one of her earliest roles, is divine as the victim of Colman's madness. This film gives new meaning to the phrase "disappearing into a character."

While COVID-isolated, I binge-watched Ryan Murphy's "Hollywood", a hypothetical look at what US entertainment could've been had people stood up to racism and homophobia in the 1940s. A couple of episodes depict George Cukor, and one episode mentions "A Double Life". A few days after watching that episode I saw the movie in question. It's an intense one, with Ronald Colman (in an Oscar-winning role) as a thespian who lets his performance gain too much control of his existence. It's impressive how, in these movies focusing on stage performances, the play can sometimes come across as more intense than the person's life, as happens in this movie. It's not a masterpiece, but Colman puts on one of the most haunting performances of all. I definitely recommend it