A fine cast can't save this dreary melodrama from
drowning in a sea of purple prose and predictability. Even Monty Woolley
being Monty Woolley and making his usual acerbic remarks and insults can
only give it the slightest of lifts. 'I am sorry I am late. I stopped at
the corner to throw some rocks at the children". Throwing rocks at children
always appeals to me. It is based on a play by Emlyn Williams (The Night
Must Fall) and I could not help but think how painful it must have been to
sit in a stuffy theater for two hours listening to dross that would make
a dead man cringe. After she is proposed to, Ida Lupino replies something
like "I never had any feelings for you. No thoughts of love but as soon as
you said those words I knew I would love you for the rest of my life". Yikes.
Poor tough as steel Ida Lupino with her glistening eyes having to say that.
Besides the cracker-jack team of Lupino and Woolley who give it all they
have, the film also has Cornel Wilde whose popularity still escapes me and
a fine group of character actors - Melville Cooper (the rejected suitor in
Pride and Prejudice and the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood), Sara Allgood
who played Irish older women many times and is wonderful in her role here,
William Demarest as a policeman, Milton Parsons who always looks like death
walking and J. Edward Bromberg. Bromberg was a fine actor - small of stature
who showed up in really diverse roles - saw him not long ago as a foolish
Nazi in The Invisible Agent. He was blacklisted - refused to answer any questions
from HUAC and his career was over and it killed him as it did John Garfield.
His name was given to the Committee by Elia Kazan.
Woolley plays a legendary theater actor who got drunk before a performance
and has not set foot on stage for years ever since. He now does a show with
a bottle of anything each night often for the neighbors. The Eight-Thirty
in the title is when a Broadway show begins. He is taken care of by his devoted
daughter Ida - the picture of noble self-sacrifice. People must have been
much less sensitive back then about a limp. She has a slight limp - like
a mild strain - and it has ruined her life - oh I can't have children because
I might pass it on to them. Wilde calls her a cripple. It is a frigging limp
you idiot. But being such a big-hearted guy he overcomes the prejudice for
"cripples" and falls in love with Ida. Like falling in love with Ida Lupino
and those googly-eyes of hers is so credit-worthy.
Well, sort of as one might expect - Woolley is given another opportunity
to act - King Lear of all things - and takes to the bottle again. Nothing
here surprises other than script-writer Nunnally Johnson (Grapes of Wrath)
didn't scrap a lot of the dialogue that Ida got stuck with. Woolley on the
other hand comes off fine - beginning as a drunken Santa Claus at Macy's
and with a few choice cracks along the way. I would guess Johnson may have
had a hand in those.
