She wants to live, but oh that foolish brain. Susan Hayward is the whole show in this updated version of "Dark Victory" about an American party girl in London who discovers that she has a terminal illness and determines to make those last hours count. At first refusing to give up her jet setter life, Hayward finds that making those hours count isn't about counting all those high society parties or the number of bourbons she consumes at them. It's about finding peace, and that means accepting her fate and the love that takes over her foolish heart as the final curtain prepares to drop.
Fans of the classic Bette Davis movie will be curious to see Hayward in that part, just a year before they played mother and daughter in "Where Love Has Gone". Diane Foster plays Hayward's devoted, more innocent sister, and Michael Craig is the brilliant doctor who gives her a type of medicine you don't need a prescription for. Edward Judd is the man she must let go in order to find herself as she struggles both with destiny and the woman she turns into as a result of her struggles.
Lavish but soapy, this is extremely enjoyable even if it lacks the profound elements of the Davis version. This seems like one of those colorful Ross Hunter remakes of 1930's tearjerkers, even though it's really a British film with an American star, much like the same year's "I Could Go on Singing" with Judy Garland. It's fascinating to watch Hayward's transformation, and she puts great subtlety in a part she could have chewed up or swallowed whole.
Fans of the classic Bette Davis movie will be curious to see Hayward in that part, just a year before they played mother and daughter in "Where Love Has Gone". Diane Foster plays Hayward's devoted, more innocent sister, and Michael Craig is the brilliant doctor who gives her a type of medicine you don't need a prescription for. Edward Judd is the man she must let go in order to find herself as she struggles both with destiny and the woman she turns into as a result of her struggles.
Lavish but soapy, this is extremely enjoyable even if it lacks the profound elements of the Davis version. This seems like one of those colorful Ross Hunter remakes of 1930's tearjerkers, even though it's really a British film with an American star, much like the same year's "I Could Go on Singing" with Judy Garland. It's fascinating to watch Hayward's transformation, and she puts great subtlety in a part she could have chewed up or swallowed whole.