Cause for Alarm!

When I saw this film I was expecting to see a non-stop action noir. It turned out to be one of the dullest noir films I've ever seen. The whole plot of the story is that a husband is jealous of the doctor he is seeing and suspects that the doctor is having a little hanky panky with his wife (Loretta Young) Loretta's perfomance is excellent as always. Too bad she had to waste her talent on this lousy film. Anyways, the husband plots to black mail his wife by writing a letter saying that the doctor and his wife plot to kill him. He tells his wife to mail it and she gives it to the mail man. Thats it! Thats the whole film right there! All that happens next is the husband tells his wife of what he did and drops dead. The wife runs around and around (making me dizzy) I had expected to see her get framed and have a trail but thats not to be. Watch the ending of film to see that "Cause For Alarm" was a false alarm.

Decent enough thriller that nevertheless suffers a gap in exposition. In spite of reviewer Jacobfam's highly revealing analytic, the narrative jump from a healthy if quirky George (Sullivan) to a bed-ridden, full-blown paranoic is simply too visually abrupt to be convincing-- and this remains the case despite the clues that Jacobfam so brilliantly assembles. After all, this is a movie and not a literary assignment . The way the narrative stands, it's as if the producers wanted to get rid of co-star Sullivan as quickly as possible so the movie would become exclusively Young's. And admittedly, the last three-fourths do become hers, in spite of the shadow George casts. Where the film works well is showing how innocent daily occurrences transform into a pattern of guilt once suspicion takes over. Ellen (Young) sees the trap closing around her that George has so cleverly laid, but there is little she can do unless she retrieves that incriminating letter. It's that pursuit that generates audience involvement. It's simply one frustration after another—a pesky salesman, a nosy neighbor, but above all, a quirky mailman (Bacon), who are sealing her fate. The script cleverly turns the mailman into just the kind of character who would stand on an unthinking rule rather than a dose of common sense. Meanwhile, the letter floats tantalizingly just beyond her reach. Some reviewers fault Young's emotional performance during the pursuit. But put yourself in her place. Her whole life hangs in the balance because of that letter. Given what's at stake, her emotional pitch seems about right. In passing—Can't help noticing similarity between this film and 1952's Beware, My Lovely, both scripted by Mel Dinelli, and both concerning a housewife trapped by an unbalanced man. But, notice in Beware how well the unbalanced man's (Robert Ryan) background is visually sketched in. Unlike Cause, there are no developmental gaps, an inclusion that makes for a more persuasive and effective narrative. Also, I recall an episode of Hitchcock Presents where a woman frantically tries to retrieve an incriminating letter. But when the missive is returned for insufficient postage, a good Samaritan maid supplies the missing postage!-- A typical touch of Hitchcock irony. Anyway, Cause remains a decent, if flawed, 75 minutes of entertainment.

This may well be Loretta Young's best performance. The undeniable beauty of Miss Young, to me, has always gone hand in hand with a coldness of personality. Even in her pre-codes (the ones I have seen) she always seems to have a "holier than thou" manner. Directed by the ever reliable Tay Garnett. George (Barry Sullivan) is convinced that his wife Ellen (Loretta Young) and the family doctor, who was an old boyfriend of Ellens, are trying to kill him. He has written a letter to the district attorney implicating them in his murder should anything happen to him. Ellen is innocent but it is not clear at the start if she has something to hide. During one of his ramblings he has a heart attack and dies. The flashback that occurs showing how they met makes him appear to be a normal fun loving guy but when relating a childhood incident he proves he is anything but. The rest of the film is quite suspenseful as Ellen tries to retrieve the letter she has just posted from an over zealous postman. I think the film belongs to Loretta. As the "perfect wife" at the beginning of the film she gives way to mounting hysteria as she vainly tries to recover the letter. First appealing to an immovable postman, then to the post office manager, she makes herself look more guilty and suspicious as the time goes on. The alienation and isolation of life in 50s middle America is apparent throughout the film. The neighbour, who finally breaks the ice and asks her in for a coffee and the little boy, who calls himself "Hoppy" whose only friend seems to be Ellen. I would really recommend this film.

For the life of me I can't understand why Loretta Young fought so hard to get this part. It hardly shows her to her best advantage on screen. She's terribly miscast in a role that Barbara Stanwyck could have phoned in or Joan Crawford have telegraphed. She's Mrs. Suburban Housewife to all appearances, married to Barry Sullivan who's now bedridden with a touch of illness. Physical and mental. Sullivan's conceived of a plot that Loretta's hatching with the doctor, Bruce Cowling to kill him. It's all in his mind, but Sullivan's written a letter to the District Attorney and Loretta gave it to the postman. Loretta spends the rest of the film trying to get that letter back, but in the end fate and good old Dr. Cowling seem to solve her problems in the end. I say seem to because given her behavior during most of the 73 minutes of the film, there ain't no way she ain't raised a few eyebrows. In other words she's got plenty Cause For Alarm. My guess is that since the character of the wife is on screen every moment of the film and narrates the melodrama Loretta might have seen it as a good woman's picture where the female dominates. She probably also wanted to expand her range from films like The Farmer's Daughter and Come to the Stable so she decided to poach on Stanwyck/Crawford territory. Her best scenes are with Irving Bacon the complaining postman and with Postal Superintendent Art Baker trying to retrieve that letter. Also she has some nice scenes with young Brad Morrow the kid in the Hopalong Cassidy suit which was just becoming the rage back then. The scenes with Morrow are to establish the niceness of her character, not the sort who plans on killing husbands. Cause For Alarm just was not material in Loretta Young's league.

This "B" level MGM throw-away is an overwrought drama whose plot depends upon characters consistently making the wrong decisions. Young's talent is wasted in this movie. The location filming is enjoyable, and it's always interesting to see late 40s, early 50s LA suburbia. Just because a film was made in 1950 or 51, and contains so-called suspense,it not automatically designated as a "noir." Look up the term in a film guide. The users on IMDb have gotten completely out of hand in their tossing around of film terms - ESPECIALLY "noir." A question: Regardless of whether the wife managed to get back the letter, wouldn't her irrational behavior STILL arouse suspicion in the community, once her husband's death becomes known?

Mercifully brief, Cause for Alarm! (that exclamation point is the most exciting thing about it) is a far-fetched and thoroughly foolish damsel-in-distress vehicle for that pair of cheekbones known as Loretta Young. Directed by the overrated Tay Garnett, it resurrects every mouldering old trope about the imperilled woman that had already become laughable by the mid-1930s. Loretta enters vacuuming her immaculate suburban domicile (judging by the growth of ivy around the door, it's a sedate pre-war suburb, not some tacky tract home). Upstairs, her invalid husband (Barry Sullivan) is supposedly resting but is actually scribbling a screed to the District Attorney, accusing his wife and his doctor of plotting to kill him. The script would have us believe that his dementia emerged full-blown on that very morning. Sullivan gets Young to mail the letter, then turns on her, waving a gun around, at which point she reverts to total imbecility -- her only concern is retrieving that darn letter. There's a lot of business that adds up to nothing, including a nosy in-law bearing jellied consomme and a neighbor kid in a Hopalong Cassidy outfit who makes Young the present of a toy television which is promptly placed near her husband's bedside. A plot point, surely? It goes nowhere. Despite any evidence, we nourish a furtive hope that perhaps Young and the hunky doctor ARE in fact plotting the murder; that Sullivan is being slowly killed by overdoses of his heart medicine. This, at least, would make a more interesting movie -- and give substance to Young's hysteria (she certainly acts as though she were guilty). Barren of suspense if inadvertently amusing, Cause for Alarm! Is so thin that it's resolution hinges on a case of insufficient postage.

Gracious. The most suspense engendered by this weak and unfocused film is whether I would be able to bear watching it to the end. After a whirlwind WW2 romance, temporary nurse Ellen marries impetuous fly-boy George, despite Dr. Ranney's unspoken love for her. The war over, and George suffering from an unspecified complaint, Ellen finds herself dealing with a cantankerous and paranoid husband, who is certain that she and Ranney are trying to kill him. Confronting Ellen after duping her into mailing a letter incriminating both her and Ranney, George drops dead--and Ellen must try to get back the letter. So much for plot. Reviewers who have referred to this overwrought trifle as "noir" must have missed the abundant California sunshine that suffuses this picture with light, extending even to the beach scenes during the courtship flashbacks. With nary a shadow to be seen, this hardly qualifies as noir. If anything, it's linked more to the New Realism of postwar disappointment as played out in the *vastly* superior "The Best Years of Our Lives." For example, what IS the mysterious illness that leaves veteran George feeling less than a man? But overtones of New Realism are wholly beside the point, as that aspect of the film is ignored completely. The script is based on a radio play, and those melodramatic roots are showing. As Ellen, Loretta Young seems to get stupider and stupider as the movie progresses, until the viewer half wishes she'd be caught, convicted, and executed, and put us all out of our misery. The best parts of the film are the fussy and bureaucratic post office workers who drive Ellen to distraction, and the brief glimpse of a teen-aged Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer as one of two boys repairing a hotrod, who give Ellen directions. The film is short but seems to last forever. Your call.

Loretta Young acts up a storm as a woman (Ellen) married to a terminally ill man (George) who believes she is planning to murder him. Husband Barry Sullivan composes a letter to the District Attorney, explaining how exactly Young will commit the murder The film is a showcase for Young, and she delivers a fine performance. The story, however, is very hard to accept. There are many things happening on the screen which needed to be more fully explained. For starters, the husband's illnesses - how does his heart condition affect his mind as manifested on screen? Then, there are several actions Young takes which do not seem to be the choices most level-headed thinking individuals would take. So, maybe she's not exactly a level-headed thinking individual? ****** Cause for Alarm! (1951) Tay Garnett ~ Loretta Young, Barry Sullivan, Bruce Cowling

Cause for Alarm! is directed by Tay Garnett and adapted to screenplay by Mel Dinelli and Tom Lewis from a story written by Larry Marcus. It stars Loretta Young, Barry Sullivan and Bruce Cowling. Music is scored by Andre Previn and cinematography by Joseph Ruttenberg. George Jones is suffering from a heart condition and confined to his bed. An aloof and suspicious man, he assumes his wife and doctor, the latter a good friend, are conspiring to poison him and outlines his suspicion in a letter to the District Atttorney. Getting his wife to pass the letter on to the postman, he gleefully tells his wife what he has done. So when he actually does die, shortly after, wife Ellen panics and sets about retrieving the letter..... Slight plot but well acted, Cause for Alarm! is an efficient pot boiling thriller. Tagged as a "suburban noir," it's a film that has had an up and down experience in terms of critical appraisal. What we can say now is that it does carry with it a degree of ambiguity, where once back in the day it was seen as a straight forward narrative, with Young's ever increasingly fraught wife trying to correct a wrong she hasn't in fact done; now it's quite possible that her telling of the story (via narration) is "arguably" a hokey smoke screen for a dastardly deed. It's the ambiguity, to me at least, that gives the film watchable value. For without it the film just plays out as a chase and deceive movie, one with a couple of colourful characters inserted in for plot suspense enhancement, and featuring a clumsy character thread about parental yearning. Production (in 14 days) and cast performances are good. Young engages by exuding genuine sweaty stress, and supporting turns from Margalo Gillmore and Irving Bacon, as annoyingly talkative aunt and postman respectively, leave favourable marks. Direction from multi genre helmer Garnett is nicely on the simmer, while Ruttenberg's photography brings shadows and light to this twitchy part of suburbia. But the ending, if indeed there are no tricks being played, is a thoroughly unsatisfying outcome. There are those who have delved deep in search of meaning and explanations of character motives and reactions, with that the film has an aura of mystery about it. Certainly there are more questions than answers unfolded during the relatively short running time, and that's OK, we like that Sullivan's bile based husband courts no sympathy. However, it may well be that the film was merely just meant to be a suspenseful little ole race against time drama, a tale about a woman who just married a less than honourable man. It's watchable and the paranoia elements do indeed bring it into the film noir realm, but your enjoyment of it may depend on if you side with the theory that there is more than meets the eyes and ears. Personally I have my doubts, and the thought of having to watch it again is about as appealing as painting Loretta's picket fence on the hottest day of the year. 5/10

"Cause for Alarm" is a great story idea. Unfortunately, so much was wrong with the execution of the idea that it really lost my interest well before the film ended. When the story begins, Loretta Young plays a woman whose husband (Barry Sullivan) is bed-ridden with a heart condition. She is exhausted caring for him—particularly because he is NOT an easy patient. He is demanding, paranoid and losing his mind. The doctor who visits the home to see him can see this but the wife resists having him institutionalized or putting him into the care of a psychotherapist. Here is where the story gets VERY interesting—the husband is so paranoid that he's imagined his wife is having an affair with his doctor AND he's sent a letter to the District Attorney saying that his wife is trying to kill him. This is a neat idea—as it is when he then confronts her and tries to kill her—and he ends up dying of a heart attack in the struggle! But, what happens next really, really irritated me. Instead of calling to report this, she tries throughout the rest of the film to get that letter that she put in the mail for her husband earlier that day. And, during all this time, she behaves VERY guiltily and gives everyone reason to doubt her sanity or think she DID kill her husband. This is clearly a case of very bad writing—as the character and Miss Young's performances seemed weird and unbelievable. Additionally, although the story was a great idea, it seemed more appropriate for a short film or episode of a TV anthology series (like "Alfred Hitchcock Presents") as the plot wasn't enough to carry a 73 minute film. All in all, a great example of a great story idea that is poorly executed….very poorly executed. No one is THAT stupid and the film loses steam because of this.