Jacques Tourneur directed this surprisingly effective tale of Victor Mature, a major league football player who is King of the Gridiron, until he finds he has a heart murmur that requires his retirement from active playing. It would turn team owner Lloyd Nolan into a figure of frustration and disappointment because he's out to win the championship for the team this year.
Mature is desperately in love with his wife, the ambitious Lizabeth Scott, whose boutique is supported by Mature's salary but who, herself, has little talent. She appears to love him too. She's very demonstrative. But her love is conditional. She would like to see both of them as clones of Donald Trump.
Mature's adoration of his wife precludes his spilling the beans about his heart condition. The best he could hope for after retirement would be an assistant coach at a lowly state university of the kind I was graduated from, and at a much lesser salary. None of this would sit well with Scott, who is indifferent to losers.
However, word gets around and it leads to a public argument and the estrangement of the erstwhile happy couple.
Here's where it gets inventive. For one thing, Lizabeth Scott's character could have been made into Lady MacBeth. Instead, she's given more than one dimension. She's mistaken in many ways but she really DOES love Mature. She gets drunk and sobs when a friend of hers, a model, commits suicide after being disowned by some kind of industrial magnate. The magnate is Art Baker, who may give the most nuanced performance in the film, and the most carefully rendered of his modest career. The guy is unflappable. He seduces Scott and is brutally honest with her from beginning to end of the affair.
There's another figure, and a woman too, who is in love with Mature. Lucille Ball is the wisecracking secretary whom Mature dislike but who takes care of him when he needs caring for.
With that kind of set up -- a man of moral principle, a wife who is a paragon of terpitude, and another upright woman who loves him from afar, the expectable outcome is expectable. Man of principle kicks undeserving wife out on her arse and marries the devoted secretary.
But, no. Mature does decide to not play the last vital game and perhaps die, but he slaps Scott in the face twice and their affection is strong enough that she is now willing to accompany him to that lowly position in the lowly university at the lowly salary. (You may have to gulp down that hurried ending.) That affair with Baker has taught her something. You should never become too attached to anything, especially success, because sooner or later you lose it. OR -- she might have become a closet Buddhist during her estrangement.
The director, Tourneur, did some startling work in Val Lewton's production unit at RKO. This isn't among his best work, but he does bring some subtlety to the project. He sometimes uses dramatic lighting, that doesn't always work. The musical score features a performance of a marvelous jazz standard, "Easy Living," written by Ralph Rainger and Leo Robin for a 1937 film of the same name. The lazy and improbable melody was ironic for having been written during the Great Depression, and it's appropriate here in a story about people who are ready to sacrifice their lives to achieve stardom.
Summing it up, one of the better movies about aging or otherwise-failing football players. Worth watching.
Mature is desperately in love with his wife, the ambitious Lizabeth Scott, whose boutique is supported by Mature's salary but who, herself, has little talent. She appears to love him too. She's very demonstrative. But her love is conditional. She would like to see both of them as clones of Donald Trump.
Mature's adoration of his wife precludes his spilling the beans about his heart condition. The best he could hope for after retirement would be an assistant coach at a lowly state university of the kind I was graduated from, and at a much lesser salary. None of this would sit well with Scott, who is indifferent to losers.
However, word gets around and it leads to a public argument and the estrangement of the erstwhile happy couple.
Here's where it gets inventive. For one thing, Lizabeth Scott's character could have been made into Lady MacBeth. Instead, she's given more than one dimension. She's mistaken in many ways but she really DOES love Mature. She gets drunk and sobs when a friend of hers, a model, commits suicide after being disowned by some kind of industrial magnate. The magnate is Art Baker, who may give the most nuanced performance in the film, and the most carefully rendered of his modest career. The guy is unflappable. He seduces Scott and is brutally honest with her from beginning to end of the affair.
There's another figure, and a woman too, who is in love with Mature. Lucille Ball is the wisecracking secretary whom Mature dislike but who takes care of him when he needs caring for.
With that kind of set up -- a man of moral principle, a wife who is a paragon of terpitude, and another upright woman who loves him from afar, the expectable outcome is expectable. Man of principle kicks undeserving wife out on her arse and marries the devoted secretary.
But, no. Mature does decide to not play the last vital game and perhaps die, but he slaps Scott in the face twice and their affection is strong enough that she is now willing to accompany him to that lowly position in the lowly university at the lowly salary. (You may have to gulp down that hurried ending.) That affair with Baker has taught her something. You should never become too attached to anything, especially success, because sooner or later you lose it. OR -- she might have become a closet Buddhist during her estrangement.
The director, Tourneur, did some startling work in Val Lewton's production unit at RKO. This isn't among his best work, but he does bring some subtlety to the project. He sometimes uses dramatic lighting, that doesn't always work. The musical score features a performance of a marvelous jazz standard, "Easy Living," written by Ralph Rainger and Leo Robin for a 1937 film of the same name. The lazy and improbable melody was ironic for having been written during the Great Depression, and it's appropriate here in a story about people who are ready to sacrifice their lives to achieve stardom.
Summing it up, one of the better movies about aging or otherwise-failing football players. Worth watching.