Gotta tell you, when Claude Rains is great, he is great and when he's not - as he was most definitely in this tripe - he's nauseatingly awful. He has to be reined in or else he goes off in such obvious routes of ham acting, you wish he'd just shut up, or, better still, just leave the movie entirely. See Casablanca and Notorious and Mr. Skeffington and see some great acting, particularly the first two. But in this, he's full of baloney. In fact , listening to him, as I am at this moment, he makes you want to puke, so false is his every reading. The hero, Michael North, whose last film this was, is as bland as Rains is florid. Interestingly, I checked out the NY Times review online, by the (in)famous Bosley Crowther, who wrote that these 2 guys were good, and the other cast members were as patly artificial as the plot. He ought to have included these 2 hams in that group and kept Constance Bennett (especially) and Fred Clark and Hurd Hatfield out of it. They managed to pull off some real bite. Hammy Audrey Totter and especially dull dull dull Joan Caulfield can both hold hands with North and Rains as they go down in this overblown catastrophe. On a better note, nice lighting and shadowy lit rooms. Michael Curtiz directed. I'll stick with his great films - Casablanca, Errol Flynn's luscious swash bucklers and several others that don't come to mind. Funny about that: great actors, like Rains and great directors, like Curtiz, can go so wildly off kilter and come up with some clinkers like this poor sap of a film and then produce brilliant works of art.
Review of The Unsuspected
