NORA PRENTISS (director: Vincent Sherman; screenwriter: Richard Nash/Jack Sobell/ from an unpublished story by Paul Webster "The Man Who Died Twice"; cinematographer: James Wong Howe; editor: Owen Marks; cast: Ann Sheridan (Nora Prentiss), Kent Smith (Dr. Richard Talbot), Bruce Bennett (Dr. Joel Merriam), Robert Alda (Nick Dinardos), Rosemary DeCamp (Lucy Talbot), John Ridgely (Walter Bailey), Robert Arthur (Gregory Talbot), Wanda Hendrix (Bonita Talbot), Helen Brown (Miss Judson), Rory Mallinson (Fleming), Harry Shannon (Police Lieutenant), James Flavin (District Attorney), Douglas Kennedy (doctor), Don McGuire (Truck Driver), Clifton Young (Policeman); Runtime: 111; Warner Bros.; 1947)
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
A solid noir melodrama from Vincent Sherman, who takes a standard story and dresses it up with moving characterizations and beautifully expressionistic B&W photography from cinematographer James Wong Howe. The director took a songwriter Paul Webster's short magazine story called "The Man Who Died Twice" and improved the story by rounding out the characters to give them both strong and weak points, so that they would not be one-note characters as was the case in the original story. The film was made by Warner Brothers, who needed a film for their contract star Ann Sheridan and asked Sherman to change the story around so that her part as Nora Prentiss, a nightclub singer, is expanded.
The movie posters said, 'If you were Nora Prentiss, would you keep your mouth shut?' The other famous quote from this film is 'A mouth like hers is just for kissing...not for telling!' The film proved to be popular with the public, especially with the women in the audience, and it turned out to be a big hit for Ann Sheridan.
You can set your clock by the 43-year-old Dr. Richard Talbot (Kent Smith), as he has never been late to work in the last ten years. He's a dedicated physician with a comfortable San Francisco lifestyle, whose life is routine at home and at work. He is married to a bossy wife, Lucy (Rosemary), who loves him and their two teenager children in her own prim way, but she can't give him a better life than the dull conventional one he has. The romance has gone out of their life and the doctor feels confined, but takes solace in raising his kids and in the success of his medical practice, where he's a partner with Dr. Joel Merriam (Bruce Bennett). Talbot is so straight-laced that there is never a question of him fooling around with another woman, so his wife keeps busy with either her mother or social causes with friends, allowing him free time to write for medical journals in order to gain more of a reputation in his field.
The doctor's life is to change forever on the one day he reported late to work for the first time and thereby left work for home later than usual, and as he was crossing the street, an attractive lady gets hit by a truck. He treats her minor bruises in his office and is taken in by her alluring sexy ways. She seems to be playing with him, pleased with his shyness and the attention he shows her, figuring he's so different from her and the men she knows, that she can get a few laughs at his awkward flirtations with her. But when he takes an earnest interest in her and is not put off with her being a chanteuse, things become more romantic and she becomes afraid that he's the kind of guy she's always been looking for and that because he's married, he will leave her as soon as he gets what he wants from her. She is afraid that she will be the one who is hurt in this romance.
He goes to watch her sing; meets her nightclub boss Nick (Alda), and begins an affair with her, whereby he starts staying out late at night. He doesn't have the nerve to tell his wife that he fell in love with someone else, but when forced into a situation of either telling his wife or losing her, he decides to tell his wife. But that is the night his favorite child Bonita is having her "Sweet Sixteen' birthday party, and he doesn't have the heart to spoil the family celebration. Nora upon hearing that he couldn't tell his wife, tells him she's leaving that night for New York to work in the new club Nick is opening there.
As a contrivance to the soap opera plot, a patient of his, Mr. Bailey, who is a loner, dies of a heart attack in his office. By coincidence, he is the same age, height, weight, and has the same colored brown hair. Talbot decides to fake his death by putting his wallet and identification papers on Bailey and then exploding his car with Bailey in it. He then flees to New York to live with Nora in her apartment under an assumed name. But he doesn't go outside of the apartment, after he reads in the San Francisco newspaper that the district attorney opened up his case as a homocide.
Back in San Francisco, Dr. Merriam had found a burned letter in Talbot's office, whose readable part says how desperate he is. He becomes suspicious, reporting what he found to the police, thinking Talbot might have committed suicide. But the police say all the proof points to him being murdered, that he had been blackmailed, as they discover he emptied out his saving account before the car wreck.
He starts drinking heavily when he sees that Nora is becoming a star and that his life seems wasted, and he imagines that she is seeing Nick. In a jealous, drunken fit, he goes after Nick and thinks he killed him. But he sees a silver lining to his misery when he gets into a car accident soon after that incident and has his face disfigured, which requires plastic surgery, making him unrecognizable.
The film was told from the opening flashback, where he is arrested in New York because of his fingerprint matching the one found in the San Francisco crime scene and he is brought back to San Francisco to face murder and blackmail charges. He is told by his lawyer that he better tell him something in his defense or else he will get the death penalty. In court his family and friends do not recognize him, but speak of Dr. Talbot as a fine man. He asks Nora to remain silent, that he'd rather die convicted of murdering himself, than of having his family think of him as anything but a nice guy and a good family man.
The glossy story might not be much on paper, but the telling of it was superb, showing how trapped the main characters became because of their lie.
REVIEWED ON 11/15/2000 GRADE: B
Dennis Schwartz: "Ozus' World Movie Reviews"
http://www.sover.net/~ozus
ozus@sover.net
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