Tue 7 Jul 2009
TWO OF A KIND. Columbia Pictures, 1951. Edmond O’Brien, Lizabeth Scott, Terry Moore, Alexander Knox, Griff Barnett. Co-screenwriters: James Edward Grant, James Gunn, Lawrence Kimble. Director: Henry Levin.
I can’t tell you why it took three writers to get this movie made, but I think the results show it. Or at least that was my opinion before I even knew who the screenwriters were, and how many. One of them is James Gunn, the hard-boiled mystery writer, by the way, not the science fiction writer James Gunn.
“Our” James Gunn has only one major entry in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, that being Deadlier Than the Male (Duell, 1942), which was later the basis of the movie Born to Kill, the one with Lawrence Tierney and Claire Trevor — you know the one.
In any case, this movie starts out like gangbusters, with the hauntingly beautiful Lizabeth Scott tracking down — for reasons unknown — an orphan born in the Chicago area by the name of Michael Farrell (Edmond O’Brien). It turns out that she has a pretty good swindle in mind, along with a steadily unscrupulous lawyer, played by Alexander Knox.
It turns out that a wealthy couple have been trying to find their son who’s been missing since he was three years old. Farrell might be a very good match, except for one small detail. The boy, if he’s still alive, would lack the tip of the little finger on his left hand.
Luckily they didn’t invent car doors for nothing.
But if you’re looking for a good solid noir movie, it’s downhill from here. But don’t get me wrong. If you’re looking for a good solid crime story, albeit a semi-softhearted one, built around an even better con game, complicated by an attempted murder and other good features, waste no time in looking further.
Edmond O’Brien’s easy mannerisms do him well in ingratiating himself with the missing boy’s parents, to the consternation of the lawyer, who also isn’t terribly pleased with how he also seems to get along very well with Brandy Kirby (the previously mentioned Lizabeth Scott).
Did I mention that it took all of Brandy Kirby’s feminine wiles to convince Farrell that he really didn’t need that tip of his finger? I should have. The money, running to a share of millions of dollars, wouldn’t have done it, not by itself alone. Being a law-obeying kind of guy myself, I don’t know whether or not I’d go for the combo (Brandy plus the money), but it would be an awfully close call.
And if you were wondering, the “two of a kind” in the title are Mike Farrell and Brandy Kirby. Terry Moore’s character comes into it for a while — she plays a semi-loopy teen-aged girl who falls for Farrell briefly herself — but this is Lizabeth Scott’s movie all the way, and when she wants something, look out.
July 7th, 2009 at 10:32 pm
The dress Scott is wearing in that poster is reason enough to watch the movie. Actually, it’s not a bad film, a sort of semi soft boiled crime movie, predictable, but not bad for it. And I have to second Steve: with Scott in the picture Terry Moore is little more than window dressing. Nice window dressing, but Scott’s the draw.
O’Brien was a dependable lead and later character actor and probably one of the most underrated actors of his era. Richard Burton called him the finest Shakespearian actor he had ever seen after catching his MacBeth on stage.
You can never tell by the number of screenwriters. Sometimes it speaks to a troubled script and others it just means three different writers contributed at different times to a stories development.
Often as not, due to the complex politics of how script credits are assigned, the credits on screen don’t really tell us a lot. Neither Max Brand or F. Scott Fitzgerald had many actual on screen credits but each acted as screen doctors on many uncredited scripts. At one point Brand was making more than many stars and had one of the biggest and most lavish offices on the lot.
As often as not one or two writers do the original screenplay and move on, and then once the thing is being filmed more writers are brought on for various rewrites during the actual shooting or even after the film is completed if something doesn’t work in previews.
I can think of films with whole armies of screenwriters like The Princess Comes Across or Five Came Back that were solid seamless films and others with only a single name on the writing credits that are a confusing mess. There is no hard and fast rule, though critics tend to lean toward the idea that multiple screenwriters is a sign of a troubled production.
July 21st, 2024 at 10:23 pm
[…] films in this set are The Killer That Stalked New York (1950), Two of a Kind (1951 and reviewed here) and The Glass Wall) (1953). Two of a Kind starts out in fine fashion, but in my opinion fades […]