There is some clever dialog in this screenplay. Editor Robert Ryan to reporter Jacky Cooper: "You're as important to this newspaper as my tonsils, which I lost some forty years ago." And to his wife, Myrna Loy, "Sleep dwell upon thy breast, for I shall not." Sounds like the Bard but it's original. He does insinuate a phrase from "As You Like It" later on, about readers "mewling and puking". He sneaks in Pope too: "Hope springs eternal," and even paraphrases Pliny the Elder, "Dreams are the pillars that hold up our lives." But then Ryan's character speaks this way throughout, acidic, witty, faux elegant, cheerfully cynical. It's the kind of speech usually reserved for Clifton Webb or other supercilious poufs. However, Ryan's character is far from a self-satisfied snob. He's angry beyond imagining. He can't forgive his wife's brief affair of ten years ago. He drinks too much. He's about to pop like a zit. Ryan's intense performances gives the editor's character almost more bitterness than the viewer can handle.
Not all the dialog is so ornate. Maureen Stapleton to Clift, whom she has just aggressively seduced but who now is so guilt-ridden that he doesn't want to meet her again: "Listen! What did you call me up for? What did you want? You wanted some ACTION -- and so did I!" Or so original. Clift's girl friend, Dolores Hart: "I want to know your every thought. I love you." "Has anybody ever figured out how many tears you cry in a lifetime?" Clift: "I know I can never run away from myself."
But back to the movie. It's not at all bad if it's approach as a morality play. Ryan hires novice Clift to write the "Miss Lonelyhearts" column for the Gazette or the Chronicle or the Picayune or whatever it is. At first, Clift and the rest of the staff ridicule the agony in the letters but Clift begins to be affected by what he sees as genuine misery and Ryan sees as just so much fakery. The editor challenges Clift. Go out and meet one of these whiners. It's Maureen Stapleton in a fine performance and she makes mincemeat out of Clift's principles. Clift's bourgeois girl friend, Dolores Hart, shuns his company and Ryan gloats. There is a nearly lethal confrontation at the end and everything is resolved, more or less.
Clift by this time was pounding a lot of booze, carrying around a thermos bottle of grapefruit juice and vodka, but he does well enough by the role of the naive reporter, hunched over, blinking, heaving his body slowly up and down. Dolores Hart is beautiful in a perfectly conventional way. She was to become a nun shortly. It may have been a good move because she looks and sounds more like television than feature films. A little gratuitous nudity wouldn't have hurt before her departure. Mike Kellin adds a lot as a relaxed, chipper, stoic reporter.
If the movie has a problem it's that it's over-written. It sounds like the stage play it was. Nobody talks like Robert Ryan's character. Nobody even knows who the hell Pliny the Elder was. It's schematic, full of episodic lessons about empathy and treachery, a sour movie overall. Nothing is wasted. In this respect it's different from a more naturalistic movie about newspapers. See "All The President's Men" for a convincing portrait of journalistic dynamics and character development.
I don't mean to sound too harsh. It's a good movie, and portrays no more dismal a view of human nature than Nathaniel West's other works. West was like a grown-up Holden Caulfield. For what it's worth, the sociologist Erving Goffman quoted the line about a girl having no nose in his book dealing with deformities, "Stigma."
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