Gloria Grahame was awful, her character worse

I'm intrigued by your reaction to Gloria Grahame's performance. In my opinion, she was not a "romantic lead" and thus had no responsibility to be likeable. I don't believe there are any romantic leads in this film. Yes, we got to see a glimpse of her romantic situation, but only as a way to set up the pivotal scene at her home in which the covert agent Reilly must decide whether Lucy's letter to "William Martin" was genuine. And in order for him to believe her words, she had to be the kind of woman who was self-absorbed, morose and overly dramatic, and thus would indulge in the lengthy "woe is me" speech which Reilly ultimately fell for. The director had to walk a fine line between keeping her performance true to the realistic style of the movie, and yet also be dramatic enough to allow for the excesses of that pivotal scene. Perhaps he was not always successful at maintaining that delicate balance.

The element that I winced at most often was the lush musical score, which often threw a melodramatic feel into the movie, and therefore was very jarring to me. Gloria Grahame's big moments were swamped by the over-indulgent score which worked against the movie's realistic style. Sure, it was a standard practice for movies of its era, but it was a poor choice, in my opinion, and undermined Gloria's big scenes. Lucy needed to be melodramatic, but not the movie itself.

She wasn't likable, but there are people like that. I thought her makeup job was the worst. Was there a time when the greasy face look was desired??

She's protecting herself. She's scared to death. She's convinced any man she falls for during the war is going to die, so she works hard NOT to fall in love, just to have a good time. But her scheme fails. She falls in love in spite of herself. And now every phone call, every knock at the door, every stranger approaching her will bring her bad news.

More caricature than character? Sounds like one of my lines.

Leaving aside the inadequacy of Lucy's characterisation, maybe it's the case that Grahame was i) rather a hammy actress and ii) American. Playing up against all those stiff-necked Brits made her seem worse than normal.

I'm not familiar with her work, but I really couldn't stand her—her face so shiny and sweaty, it was disgusting, her lips so lipsticky and dark, it must have been an obnoxiously dazzling shade of red, her face that wouldn't contort, her lips that were sealed with plastic and couldn't move—it was really bizarre and unappealing.

But my sympathy broke when her character broke down and she cried over her metaphoric boyfriend's death. Poor acting or not, that scene made me really admire her. The piano that played itself was a little weird, but her tale of woe seemed genuine and heartfelt, and watching Josephine Griffin (the blonde) in the background with (to my eyes) an apparent mixture of relief (a slight smile at one point) but simultaneous realization and sadness of her friend's loss was really an incredible moment in the film.

Aside from that little bit of glory, I see what you mean.

Here is an except from Bosley Crowther's 4/6/56 review in the New York Times, where he alludes to Grahame's poor performance as well as other deficiencies:

"There are two things the matter with it. One is Clifton Webb in the role of the sorcerer who plots this trickery. He is too lofty and prim. There is not enough about him to excite you with the devilish cleverness of this man. Robert Flemyng in the role of his apprentice is also a bit too smug—that is, for helping to give this picture the desirable atmosphere of the bizarre."

"The other fault is that the planning and execution of the trick lack suspense. They run off with documentary precision, undisturbed by any seemingly insuperable checks."

"An attempt has been made by Nigel Balchin, the screenplay writer, to remedy this lack in the latter part of the film. He has contrived a bit of sleuthing in London to determine the authenticity of the corpse by a Nazi spy. And in this section, the film does have some tension—until it snaps on a silly snag. For a spell you think the spy may spot the trickery. Then this ridiculous thing occurs."

"It is that a London girl who has been used as the model for the contrived sweetheart of the corpse, without knowing it, still acts by coincidence in such a way as to deceive the snooping spy. It may be that Gloria Grahame's performance as the girl is so very poor, while Stephen Boyd's is so good as the snooper, that the whole scene is incredible. From this point on, it is a matter of getting it over with—fast."

"Ronald Neame as the director has managed to use color and CinemaScope in such a way that they are not too offensive in what should be, for the right flavor, a regular black-and-white film."


❇ If you can remember the '60s, then you weren't there. ❇

Did we watch the same movie? What was so awful about Grahame's acting, or her character? Aside from the bad makeup, I don't recall anything that God-awful in her performance.

I agree with the OP that her performance is awful. Nearly a deal breaker for me fwiw. Not just GG's fault; clearly a team effort was involved in producing such an awful depiction: the music, the cinematography, the dialogue, the direction- it is all so dreadfully misguided. It smacks of movie makers thinking audiences are stupid and will lap this over the top stuff up. What it ultimately shows is they don't even trust or value their own work. Really good film makers don't make these sorts of concessions.

While I'm here, Stephen Boyd is also pretty ropey too.