The Man I Love

Worth watching for the tough, back-street elegance of Lupino as a good hearted scrappy canary, and the always professional direction of Walsh. The script, however, is poor, crowded (too crowded!) with low life and noirish incidents, rambling from one character to another until it reaches its ineffective soap opera conclusion. Bruce Bennett (the poor man's Gary Cooper) and Robert Alda are also good as Ida's love interests.

Kinda blah. It is, however, fun to see Ida Lupino slap a man down

A goulash movie; it's got a little of everything in it: romance, dialogue out of a pulp novel, mysterious back stories for several characters, melodrama galore, a jazz club gangster-lite setting, some quite decent music, and a rather unusual mano-y-mano showdown. Like goulash, though, sometimes adding too much somehow makes a bland taste. Lupino is good, especially considering few of her co-stars give her much to work with.

It's a bit of a mish-mash. It has occasional good dialogue, though it's wasted for want of a plot. Lupino is wonderful to look at but aside from her there's little to recommend about this film.

Ida Lupino handled herself as a night club lady quite adequately. There's a lot of cool little gestures, but the story was a little on the limited side. Relies on style, so if you're okay with that, this will be okay for you.

Viewed May 9, 2020.

Ida Lupino #10. Um filme pouco falado do Walsh, especialmente se comparado aos outros dois estrelados pela Lupino. Tendo o Walsh como um dos meus cineastas favoritos não esperava mais do que a excelência dele e obteve por si tal resultado apelando sobretudo para o sentido da música, como diria Boris Lermontov "The music is all that matters. Nothing but the music." e aqui há há transição da cadência pessoal de uma mulher do jazz para o blues e isso é feito tão lindamente.

Half melodrama half crime noir, but not really either when you dig in. A film about love and infatuation, seen through various interlocked stories. Nothing too complex, but it works well with what it does and Lupino in particular does a good job.

A primordial When a Woman Ascends the Stairs. It's great watching Lupino fight off creeps, but boring to see her fall for some sad sack piano player. It actually *feels* a little Narusian too, save for one silly flashback sequence, but most of the film plays out with his kind of confident pace. It gets a little "juicy" towards the end, which is dumb but Walsh knows when to stop.

Smoothly tuned vehicle for Lupino, delivering a been-around-the-block performance as a lower-bracket nightclub chanteuse who comes to L.A. to visit her kid sister, and comes within the gravitational pull of a suave mobster. A sure feel for the territory, despite the studio settings.