VividSimon Simply Perfect

MoPoshy Absolutely brilliant

Kien Navarro Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Darin One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

unbrokenmetal In 1945, successful writer Dominic Danges (Herbert Lom) returns home after the war, just to find a book called 'Hell is Sold Out' on the shelves - but he did not write this novel. In his house, he meets Valerie Martyn (Mai Zetterling) who has moved in. Since he was believed dead, she wrote the novel 'for him' and posed as his wife. He calls her a cheat and wants her to leave immediately, but unfortunately, 'Hell is Sold Out' becomes Danges' most successful novel, so the publisher wants the unmarried couple to stay together and continue the masquerade. When Valerie falls in love with Dominic's best friend Pierre (Richard Attenborough), this becomes complicated...There are two possibilities to turn such a story into a movie. Either you make it a comedy, putting the characters into hilarious situations. Or you create a drama, focusing on jealousy and intrigue. This movie, however, could apparently not decide which way to go for. Thus it became too slow for a comedy, but did not set up convincing dramatic conflicts either.

malcolmgsw In the days when this film was made the premise of taking over someone else's identity was looked on as a source of comedy.Nowdays it is looked on as a major source of crime.It would no doubt have been made rather differently and one hopes rather more entertainingly.The whole basis of this film seems rather rocky.Lom comes back from the war and finds he has "written" a novel.Whereas Zetterling has taken over his identity.Lom tells her to get out but she doesn't.Attenborough,playing a rather redundant character,falls in love with her.In the meantime Lom rather changes his mind and opts for Zetterling becoming his wife.Quite frankly the plot sounds as soppy as it sounds.Definitely not one of Lom or Attenborough's better films.

robert-temple-1 This is a pointless film. Young Richard Attenborough gives a very sensitive performance, and Herbert Lom gives a good performance as well. But the film is a meaningless ramble, based (one presumes loosely) on one of the novels by the then best-selling Maurice Dekobra, whose novels are largely unreadable today because they are so boring and badly written. I suppose one could classify this film in the genre of 'romantic comedy', despite the fact that it is neither really romantic nor funny. Mai Zetterling gives a convincing performance as an impostor who moves into the house of a successful author thought to have been killed in the War, posing as his widow. It also turns out that she has written 'his' last novel herself under his name. She did this because his publisher (broadly over-played by Hermione Baddeley in trailing boas) had herself stolen the girl's diary which had been sent to the author while away at war, and published that as 'his' previous novel. Then the author, played by Lom, returns home after all, to find himself with a 'wife' and two successful novels, neither written by himself. A situation like that could have made a most amusing film if entrusted to the correct hands, but this film by pedestrian director Michael Anderson is tedious and unrewarding. Also, despite her acting talent, one wonders what it was that people saw in Mai Zetterling to make her a star at this time in several British films. She is not at all interesting either to look at or in terms of her screen personality. Perhaps she was the only Swedish girl any of them knew, and this was as exotic as they came at that time (yawn, yawn). Pretty tame stuff, tepid as well. Don't bother.

Single-Black-Male Although Dickie Attenborough was developing as an actor at this stage in his career, he was relying on his friend, John Mills, to furnish him with roles. He plays a mediocre character in this film which makes me think that he is going sideways rather than progressing as an actor.