Black Widow (1954) Reviews

• Ginger Rogers and Peggy Ann Garner Star

  drednm2005-12-01

  Very impressive cast in a better than OK murder mystery. With touches of All About Eve and Sunset Boulevard, this film moves along at a good clip with only a few draggy scenes. Ginger Rogers plays a bitchy stage diva who is married to a mousy man (Reginald Gardiner) and lives in the same apartment building as her producer (Van Heflin) who is also married to an actress (Gene Tierney). While Tierney is away, Heflin attends one of Rogers' big parties and meets a quiet young woman (Peggy Ann Garner) who actually has no real interest in acting or theatre. She is a writer. He invites her out for a real meal and she insinuates herself into his life. The party scene is pretty funny with Ginger ripping off several "Margo Channing" ripostes at the expense of Bea Benaderet. Heflin is infatuated with the serious young Garner whose only link to the stage is her uncle (Otto Kruger) who is an actor. She also befriends a young brother and sister from Boston (Virginia Leith & Skip Homeier) who are doing the Greenwicj Village beatnik thing. Well there is an apparent suicide and that brings in a detective (George Raft) who hounds everyone. When the suicide is discovered to be a murder, things get really dicey for all involved. For the most part the acting is solid. I never liked Heflin but he's OK in this film. Rogers plays the diva well and looks great. Tierney gets a few good scenes. Raft is solid as the detective. Gardiner is especially good, but Peggy Ann Garner, a top child star of the 40s is quite excellent as the moody and strange young writer. Oddly, she didn't make a film after this one for another 12 years. She reminds me here of Barbara Bel Geddes. Bea Benaderet as the party guest, Otto Kruger as the uncle, and Leith and Homeier as the beatniks are all good. Also in this film are Cathleen Nesbitt oddly cast as a cleaning lady, Mabel Albertson is the bar owner, Hilda Simms plays the sympathetic waitress, and believe it or not, the gangly witness from the movie theater is Aaron Spelling, who would have a major career as a TV producer. Worth a watch.

• Fading stars breathe life into artificial murder mystery set on Broadway

  bmacv2003-10-06

  No matter how pretentious the cocktail party, never escape by asking another wallflower out for dinner. That was theatrical producer Van Heflin's mistake when, on the terrace of Broadway diva Ginger Rogers' apartment, he took pity on hopeful young writer Peggy Ann Garner. Just a few months later, she was found hanged in the bathroom of his apartment. It was all very innocent, though. While his wife, another star on the Rialto (Gene Tierney), was away tending to her ailing mother, Heflin let Garner use his place as a daytime office so she could write in quiet comfort. (Well, not so quiet: She listens to `The Dance of the Seven Veils' from Salome incessantly and fixates on a line from the opera: `The mystery of love is stronger than the mystery of death.') But when it turns out not only that she was pregnant but that she was murdered, the police sensibly enough find in Heflin their prime suspect. Black Widow, written and directed by Nunnally Johnson, assembles an impressive array of Hollywood luminaries across whose resumés long shadows were beginning to creep. Along with Rogers, Tierney and Heflin, there's George Raft as a police detective, Otto Krueger as Garner's actor uncle and Reginald Gardiner as Rogers' whipped spouse. It's an ensemble-cast, 40s-high-style mystery movie, made about a decade too late but not too much the worse for that (even allowing for its color and Cinemascope). Heflin's technically the center of the movie – the patsy racing around to prove his innocence. But the meatier parts go to the women, except for Tierney, all but wasted in the recessive role of the elegant but dutiful wife. Garner makes her abrupt exit early in the movie, but returns in startlingly revisionist flashbacks. And, as the grande dame (named `Carlotta,' perhaps in homage to another grande dame of the stage, Marie Dressler's Carlotta Vance in Dinner at Eight?), Rogers strides around in big-ticket outfits and fakes a highfalutin drama-queen accent. For most of the movie it seems like ill-fitting role for the essentially proletarian Rogers, but it's shrewdly written, and near the end she shows her true colors, becoming, briefly, sensational. Like Repeat Performance and All About Eve, Black Widow uncoils in a high-strung, back-stabbing theatrical milieu that's now all but vanished – all the money and the glamour have moved west. (Not to put too fine a point on it, but the tiny part of a struggling Greenwich Village actor is taken by television producer Aaron Spelling, now one of the richest men in Hollywood.) The movie cheats a little by withholding information essential to our reading of the characters, but it's a forgivable feint; the characters are all `types' anyhow. There is, however, one baffling omission – there's not a single widow in the plot.

• Glossy, classy, grade-A treatment of so-so material.

  Poseidon-32009-01-22

  Quite an accomplished cast of actors was assembled to populate this crisp mystery film, though the result is rather middling. Heflin plays a Broadway producer, married to and devoted to his actress wife Tierney. When she is away for an extended time, he strikes up an acquaintance with young hopeful Garner. She is not, however, a hopeful actress, but a hopeful writer. He allows her the use of his apartment during the daytime so she can use the city view for inspiration, but this innocent act raises a few eyebrows. Even more, it wrecks his life when the apartment becomes the scene of a murder! Heflin gives a solid performance, believable in his kindness and occasional fury. Tierney (who was, at the time, experiencing severe mental distress) is appealing, but underutilized. Rogers portrays a haughty, condescending and catty actress who has varying degrees of fondness for Heflin and Tierney and practically no respect for anyone beneath her station. Outfitted in some eye-popping gowns and hats, whenever she's on screen, the glamour-quotient skyrockets, but also so does the camp factor! One of the victims of her sharp tongue is played by Benaderet, best known for TV's "Petticoat Junction" and for being the voice of Betty on "The Flintstones." Raft plays the investigating detective in a straightforward, "Dragnet"-like fashion. Gardiner is a skillful actor but all wrong for the role of Rogers' husband, which calls for a henpecked, penniless, but also sexually desirable, man. Garner, a noted child actor, is fairly atrocious here. Her voice is annoying, her hair is a fried mess and she isn't able to fully and properly represent the type of character she's portraying in either looks or manner. The list of notable names continues with Kruger as a veteran actor, Homeier as one of Garner's beaus and Nesbitt in a thankless role as Heflin's housekeeper. Leith, a busy actress for a short window of time in the mid-50s, does a decent job as Garner's friend, though her uniquely low voice can take some getting used to (and probably contributed to her lack of widespread popularity at the time.) The story is presented out of sequence in flashbacks, which does help to prevent it from becoming too run of the mill. The settings are elegant and carefully coordinated. The widescreen format is very well handled, though it does tend to distance the viewer from the intimacies presented in the storyline. There is even a surprise or two along the way, but, ultimately, it winds up being fairly predictable. Anyone who can't figure out who the killer is must never pay any attention to old Hollywood billing! The title has very little, if anything, to do with the film.

• Well-acted, well-upholstered soap opera/murder mystery...

  moonspinner552005-12-03

  Van Heflin gives a striking, forceful performance as a theatrical producer in New York City who befriends a lonely 20-year-old girl at a party; she's a would-be writer hoping for success, he takes a shine to her and offers a helping hand...but then she turns up dead! Curiously mistitled drama really doesn't involve "a predatory female". Peggy Ann Garner is intriguing as the youngster who, in flashbacks, is revealed to be scheming and ambitious, somewhat ruthless, but not a black widow. Gene Tierney has a thankless role as Heflin's wife (she looks grim throughout), but Ginger Rogers is fun as a colorful, gossiping actress. The film has some ridiculous passages, red herrings and side-plots (one involving another young woman who appears to be fabricating a wild story just to frame Heflin is never explored), and a slightly anti-climactic finish. The film looks good and has some funny/catty lines in the beginning, but in the end it all seems a bit silly. **1/2 from ****

• The Drawingroom Gets a Face-lift

  dougdoepke2009-08-14

  Five years earlier, this drawingroom drama would have been filmed in small screen b&w. But the year is 1954 and film audiences are staying home with their new-fangled little black boxes. So a big budget studio like TCF takes what amounts to an "Ellery Queen in Manhattan" plot, gussies it up in lavish color, stretches the screen to Cinemascope length, loads up the marquee with big names, and sends the result out to compete with Lucille Ball and Milton Berle. I don't know how well the strategy succeeded commercially, but I enjoyed the movie then and still do. As a whodunit, the mystery's only partially successful—not enough suspects and too convoluted to follow. At the same time, the pacing sometimes sags in ways that undercut the suspense. Still, the 95 minutes does add up to a gorgeous tapestry, thanks to expert art direction, set decoration, and a well-upholstered cast. And who could hold together a sometimes-confusing storyline better than the always-reliable Van Heflin. Also, I expect urbane writer-director Nunnally Johnson fit comfortably with the sophisticated Manhattan setting and show-biz personalities. So, it's not surprising that he gets off some insider innuendo. Catch the cocktail party shot at gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, known for her bizarre headgear; I expect Johnson was settling an old score there. Then too, having the ingénue (Garner) turn up mysteriously pregnant is rather daring for the straitjacketed Production Code period. Also, watch for the skinny young actor (Oliver) interviewed by Heflin near film's end. That's future TV mogul Aaron Spelling getting a proverbial foot in the door. Anyway, the film provides an entertaining glimpse of drawingroom drama getting a face-lift during the early years of the television challenge.