Lightning Strikes Twice (1951)

That was an excellent one.

Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

In other words,this film is a surreal ride.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

If something is really good, I will forgive plot holes or situations that stretch the imagination. I won't do it here."Lightning Strikes Twice" stars Ruth Roman, Richard Todd, Mercedes McCambridge, and Zachary Scott. Roman plays an actress, Shelley Carnes, who has been sent out west for her health and is going to a dude ranch. The talk on the train is about Richard Trevelyan who was convicted of murdering his wife and received a death sentence. He was given a stay of execution pending a new trial and freed because the jury had one holdout who thought he was not guilty.When her car gets stuck in the mud, Shelley is helped by a man in a house nearby, who turns out to be Trevelyan. She leaves the next day. The dude ranch, it turns out, is closed. She is invited by the caretakers Liza and String (McCambridge and Darryl Hickman) to stay for a few days anyway. She has already met their neighbors, who were friends of Trevelyan. Everyone seems to be looking for him. She learns that Liza was the one holdout on the jury. Because he wasn't convicted, the people in town are nasty to her (reminds me of the Casey Anthony trial where the local restaurants wouldn't serve jurors). Liza believes in his innocence.Shelley meets Richard again, and the two of them fall in love. Shelley wants to prove him not guilty. But was he? This noirish film was a nice diversion thanks to the acting, but it had a few problems. The first is, what the heck was Liza doing on the jury if she knew this guy? Doesn't that suggest a certain prejudice? Second, things happen too fast. Roman and Todd are madly in love after one kiss and a couple of days. Third, why was Zachary Scott in this film? Talk about being superfluous, and he was hardly in it anyway.Richard Todd is miscast as Trevelyan. He and Roman make a beautiful couple, and Todd was a good actor, but he is out of place in the west, given his accent and bearing. As someone on the board suggested, Scott may have been a better choice for the role, or Jim Davis.The rest of the acting is very good, with a strong performance by Mercedes McCambridge and a solid one by Roman. In the end, though, this film is pretty routine, though atmospheric.

Terrible movie.McCambridge was all but chewing on the curtains. She over acted just like she did in "Giant". Richard Todd looked good as usual but deserved a better script. Why was he up on a dangerous ledge supposedly hiding from the public after he had been found not guilty? Was he planning to camp up there? He had no tent, equipment or food for his horse. He did throw down a hot cigarette butt in the dry sage though. Luckily no fire was written into the script on that. Guess he wasn't a Boy Scout. Ruth Roman was pretty good but must have needed the paycheck badly. She drives off in an approaching thunder storm in a convertible with the top down. Not too bright, huh? Vidor made sure she showed us her boobs though. She goes to find Richard Todd and does a very poor job of acting like she is afraid of heights up on the cliff. All of a sudden she is in love with him. Give me a break! Zac Scott also over acts and is wearing. How come he is riding the same horse that Ruth was on at the dude ranch. Is it the county horse? He takes Ruth for a car ride acting very menacing, so of course we suspect he may be a killer. Not! He takes Ruth to see Todd and drives off. Later Todd takes Ruth home in the same car. Sadly Ruth marries Todd after knowing him for only a few days. I expect they divorced soon after.

I think I just saw two movies in one. The beginning pulled me in, Ruth Roman shows a nice soft-yet-spunky ingénue side here, a little different from some of her other work, where she seems more hard-edged. However, the last 15-20 minutes were unbelievable! I thought I was watching a silent movie "mit sound" with all the double-takes and over-reactions. Some early talkies were like this, before it was learned that less gesticulating etal generally worked better when live dialog was available. I'd recommend watching this movie once, the first part for enjoyment, the last part being an amazed amusement of 'how far can they go?!' One could even watch it twice, to try to discover at exactly what point it all went terribly, but humorously wrong.

Richard Todd sits on death row, waiting execution for his wife's murder. At the eleventh hour, a reprieve and new trial come through; he's acquitted, thanks to one holdout juror (Mercedes McCambridge). Released, he disappears into the west Texas desert. Enter Ruth Roman, a touring actress in search of the desert's restorative climate. An innkeeper and his wife become solicitous of her when she stops in a small town, and lend her a car to get to the dude ranch where she hopes to recuperate. En route (in a scene prescient of Janet Leigh's flight from Phoenix in Psycho), she gets lost in thunderstorms and takes refuge in an abandoned house -- where Todd is holed up. They size one another up and, next morning, she continues on to the dude ranch. Run by McCambridge and her emotionally disturbed young brother (Darryl Hickman), it has closed down, but they agree to put Roman up for a few days. But she seeks out Todd again, despite conflicting stories about his guilt or innocence. Director King Vidor and scriptwriter Lenore Coffee, having goaded Bette Davis to pull out all the stops in Beyond The Forest two years earlier, here take on another overloaded melodrama, with mixed results. We see too little of key events and rely instead on hearsay about other characters, who sometimes haven't yet been sufficiently established (and the one brief flashback is a mistake -- we need either more or none). And of eight major characters, two or even three (including Zachary Scott) prove superfluous. But the movie's biggest stumble lies in the casting of Richard Todd. Remembered if at all as the title character in that echt-1950s biopic of pious patriotism A Man Called Peter, here his stiff British accent and acting falsify the whole Southwestern milieu (Lightning Strikes Twice, like Desert Fury of five years earlier, evokes the new Sunbelt of money and leisure). Happily, the female characters fall on the plus side. Kathryn Givney shows spunk and intelligence as the strangely solicitous Mrs. Nolan. Ruth Roman, on evidence of this movie and Tomorrow Is Another Day, had more range and subtlety than she was let display in her best known role as Farley Granger's mannikin-like fiancee in Strangers on a Train. But the acting honors, inevitably, fall to McCambridge. Looking especially tomboyish, her face registers every thought and feeling that passes through her head; she's hyper-alert in her moods and responses. And so, as was her custom during her disappointingly thin screen career, she delivers the most memorable performance of the film.