ONE TOO MANY

Ruth Warrick contemplates her next drink

ONE TOO MANY (1950). Director: Erle C. Kenton.

Helen Mason (Ruth Warrick of Guest in the House) was once a well-known concert pianist who gave it up when she married reporter Bob (Richard Travis of The Man Who Came to Dinner) and had a daughter named Ginger (Ginger Prince). She has substituted booze for her career while Bob is what Dr. Phil would call an "enabler." Helen is convinced she is not an alcoholic and can get off the sauce without going to AA. But in this she is kidding herself. Helen and Bob find their lives spiraling out of control as Helen not only continues to drink but to drive drunk, endangering herself, her daughter, and everyone else on the road ... 

The Harmonaires pad out the running time

One Too Many probably has its heart in the right place although its polemical approach to the material is not as dramatic as intended. Much of the movie has Bob and others arguing that alcoholism is a disease that needs treatment and special hospital wings, dismissing the notion that all addicts are just weak-willed drunks of low character. Unfortunately these sequences turn the movie into a lecture that makes some good points but is not terribly entertaining. Strangely, the movie is padded with a long concert sequence at the end when the black group the Harmonaires do three numbers, and Warrick plays "The Minute Waltz" and a more contemporary number on the piano in a nightclub. 

An enabler? Richard Travis

Warrick gives a good performance in this although she's not the kind of riveting actress who can give an added bite to the picture a la Stanwyck or Crawford. Travis is, as usual, likable and pleasant and laid-back even when his world seems to be falling apart. William Tracy, who plays a photographer, is given a long, tedious sequence -- more padding -- as he waits outside the window in the maternity ward where his wife is having a baby. Ginger Prince is a talented child actress who can also sing and dance. Rhys Williams, Mary Young, Thurston Hall, and Victor Kilian are all good as Sully the bartender and his wife, newspaper publisher Simes, who hates drunks, and Emery, a mayoral candidate who gets caught in an inebriated state in a bar. Larry J. Blake is fine as Helen's old friend, bandleader Walt Williams. Erm Westmore appears briefly to give Warrick a makeover. Little did audiences of 1950 know that the scourge of drugs would almost replace alcoholism as a social ill. Erle C. Kenton also directed Why Men Leave Home, which also has Westmore and Prince in it and is even worse. From Hallmark. 

Verdict: A long commercial for AA -- a cocktail might help. **. 

ARCH OF TRIUMPH

Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman

ARCH OF TRIUMPH (1948). Director: Lewis Milestone.

"A refugee without a passport has lost his membership in the human race."

In pre-WW2 Paris two strangers meet and become unhappily involved. One is Ravic (Charles Boyer), who was tortured in Austria by the Nazi Haake (Charles Laughton), and has taken illegal asylum in France. Joan (Ingrid Bergman) is a woman of "easy virtue" whose latest lover has just died. The couple seem to fall in love, but Ravic's illegal status and very real fear of jail and deportation, means he cannot get married. Then there's the added complication of Alex (Stephan Bekassy), with whom Joan gets engaged during a period when she is alone, and who is very possessive of her. Arch of Triumph, based on the novel by Erich Maria Remarque, should have been a powerful film, and it does have its moments, but it never emerges as the dramatic triumph that it could have been. A big problem -- besides the fact that everything is too prettified -- is that Boyer and Bergman have absolutely no chemistry, and even if one might acknowledge that Ravic might be a rather dour character, Boyer's emotionless and often perfunctory performance -- one of his worst -- doesn't help. Bergman is much, much better, and the picture is nearly stolen by Louis Calhern [Athena] as a friend of Ravic's who works as doorman at a Russian nightclub. Charles Laughton [They Knew What They Wanted] is excellent, as usual, as the repulsive Haake, but much more should have been made of his very final confrontation with Ravic. The fake "prince" Michael Romanoff, who opened his own Hollywood restaurant, plays the captain of the aforementioned club, and is rather unprepossessing. Ruth Warrick comes and goes too quickly to make any impression. William Conrad [East Side, West Side] , who later starred in TV's Jake and the Fat Man, has a terrific bit as a police man who corners Ravic and questions him after the former tends to an injured woman on the street. This is, I believe, the one and only picture made by Enterprise studios.

Verdict: Not terrible by any means, but not at all what it should have been. **1/2.

GUEST IN THE HOUSE

Ruth Warrick and Anne Baxter

GUEST IN THE HOUSE (1944). Director: John Brahm.

Dr. Dan Butler (Scott McKay) brings his girlfriend and patient Evelyn (Anne Baxter) to his family home for a rest cure, and she manages to bring simmering tensions to the surface. Others in the household include Dan's artist brother Douglas (Ralph Bellamy), his wife Ann (Ruth Warrick), their Aunt Martha (Aline McMahon), their little girl Lee (Connie Laird), the peppery maid Hilda (Margaret Hamilton) and her husband John (Percy Kilbride), as well as Miriam (Marie McDonald), who is Douglas' model and who some suspect is carrying on with the painter. Evelyn sets her cap on Douglas but although she's blamed for the events that transpire they seem precipitated more by the others' suspicions than by her manipulations. The cast makes the movie more interesting than it might have been otherwise, but Leave Her to Heaven the following year made much more of the theme of an emotionally disturbed, selfish woman causing havoc in a household. Baxter gives a typically vivid and appropriate performance, while the others are all on target as well, and there's a pleasant score by Werner Janssen, but this is a half-baked melodrama and little else. Well-directed by Brahm, who also directed The Undying Monster, The Mad Magician, Hangover Square, The Locket, and many episodes of such shows as Thriller, Alfred Hitchcock and The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

Verdict: At least it isn't predictable. **1/2.