Cause For Alarm [1951]

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Film noir comes to suburbia in this suspenseful gem.......2005-09-25

Cause For Alarm (1951) is something of an oddity in the film noir genre, bringing its gritty sense of increasing tension and suspense out of the shadows of the night into the bright, daytime light of suburbia. Only a talented actress could make this story work, and Loretta Young shines in the role of the distraught wife of a paranoid, dying husband. Her character Ellen Jones seems to be quite the devoted wife caring selflessly for her bedridden husband George (Barry Sullivan), and a flashback to the couple's first meeting reveals a husband madly in love with her from the moment he laid eyes on her. This happy-go-lucky fellow is a far cry from the man we meet upstairs suffering from a mysterious heart ailment, for he has come to believe that his wife and best friend/doctor, Ranney Grahame (Bruce Cowling), are plotting to kill him so that they can be together. He is so convinced of this that he sends a thoroughly incriminating letter to the district attorney before confronting Ellen with his charges. He tells Ellen all about the letter that she herself delivered into the hands of the postman but collapses before he is able to exact his mad revenge upon her personally. Ellen's in a real spot; the man she loves has just died trying to kill her, and the terrible letter already on its way to the D.A. will make everyone think she killed him. What she must do, of course, is get that letter back before it reaches its destination. What follows is a frustrating, maddening, increasingly suspenseful paper chase, with all manner of obstacles placed in Ellen's way. Trying to get a letter back from the postman may not sound exciting, but Cause For Alarm delivers an almost frenetically suspenseful plot that leaves one wondering what will happen at the very end. Not only did I wonder if she would get the letter back in time, I wondered if there was more to George's paranoid suspicions than there originally seemed, as Ellen climbs up to the very pinnacle of panic, enmeshing herself in an increasingly entangling web of lies and deceit that stand to bring upon herself the very suspicions that she seeks to avoid. Cause For Alarm really and truly kept me in growing suspense from start to finish, culminating in a perfectly effective and satisfying conclusion.

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