Beware, My Lovely

The Man, The Play & The Actor.

We are in a small town, a homely widow (Ida Lupino) hires a handyman (Robert Ryan) to look after her house. She soon starts to regret it as Ryan grows erratic by the hour, it appears that she is host to a dangerous schizophrenic, and now she is unable to escape her house.

Beware, My Lovely is adapted from Mel Dinelli's (The Spiral Staircase) story and play called "The Man". Pretty much a one set movie and a two character driven piece, the film boasts two great central performances and offers up an interesting take on mental illness. One however shouldn't be fooled into thinking this is a violent and nerve shredding picture, because it isn't. It's clear from the get go that Ryan's Howard Wilton is a dange...

Robert Ryan is effectively menacing in this drama of a loner ("Wilton") who takes a job as a factotum at the home of the sympathetic, recently widowed "Helen" (Ida Lupino). He suffers from a paranoia that leads him to believe that everyone is against him - and given the suspicious-looking opening scenes of the movie, that includes the audience too. When she finds herself alone in the house with him, the doors and windows locked and the telephone ripped from it's socket - we all begin to fear for her safety. Ryan was frequently quite a wooden actor, but here he cleverly portrays the character with much more psychology to his sense of threat that just the sheer physical (though there is a little of that, too). Harry Horner manages to build th...