Sleep, My Love

1948 "...the most terrifying words a man ever whispered to a woman!"
6.8| 1h37m| NR| en
Details

A woman wakes up in the middle of the night on board a train, but she can't remember how she got there. Danger and suspense ensue.

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Reviews

Baseshment I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.
Afouotos Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.
Mathilde the Guild Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.
Geraldine The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.
mlink-36-9815 Really boring blabbing movie. its hard to believe this script was even made. just the most annoying characters. do not bother with this movie. it is terrible. i cannot stand it. claudette colbert is awful. her character is dumb. robert cummings is really annoying. raymond burr is the best thing in the movie they should have made him the star.
MartinHafer I love film noir--so the fact that I really enjoyed "Sleep, My Love" is not especially surprising. What did surprise me, however, is that although the film has a familiar plot, it still was a good film. So, if you watch it and you are reminded of "Gaslight", "Experiment Perilous" and "Dial M For Murder", don't be at all surprised.The film begins well and really grabs your attention. A woman (Claudette Colbert) awakens to find herself on a train bound for Boston. Considering her last memory was going to bed back in New York, this is pretty amazing. What's more amazing is that as the film progresses, Colbert continues to behave strangely. At first it looks like she might be losing her mind, but very soon you begin to suspect she's being set up by her philandering husband (Don Ameche). What happens next? Tune in and see."Sleep, My Love" has some very nice things going for it. Although she's only in the film here and there, Daphne (Hazel Brooks) is amazingly effective. She's cold and a great example of a film noir dame (also called a 'femme fatale'). In addition, the film really, really ended well. I'd say more--but it was violent and exciting--and the fact that the .22 was not an especially effective weapon is quite realistic. See this film--you'll be glad you did.
secondtake Sleep, My Love (1948)OK, it's a no brainer. I love Claudette Colbert, I love this post-war period, and I love Douglas Sirk, the director. So it only figures that this unfolds in a delicious way. The closest film to this is "Gaslight," which George Cukor makes into something more intense and memorable than this. But "Gaslight" is burdened by a kind of contorted plot--the reasoning behind the fake madness is some crazy lost jewel. This one, by fortunate contrast, is a really believable plot, and Colbert is faced with a very normal plot of a husband out to drive her away.There are some weaknesses--the husband's girlfriend is pretty stiff, the Chinese pal is decent but sort of tacked on, and the overall development of things is too linear for a second viewing. But as a straight up drama, from start to finish, it's really strong. And a surprise for me was how charming in a low key way was Robert Cummings, the white knight of the story. Colbert's husband was played by the more famous Don Ameche, who is fine, though you get a sense he's going through the paces of a part, something he wasn't quite invested in.The director is famous for his later dreamy, drippy soap opera movies that are quite something on their own terms, but this is good, and an important one to see if you like his work. For me, above all, is just another great Colbert appearance. First rate in many ways.
bmacv Sleep, My Love is Douglas Sirk's crack at Gaslight. Dabbling in drugs and Mesmerism, Don Ameche rigs up psychotic "episodes" starring his wife, Claudette Colbert, so he can inherit her money. Befriended by Robert Cummings during one of these arranged "fugue" states, she unwittingly enlists an ally whose affections, and suspicions, grow. (The film takes on inadvertent Charlie Chan overtones when Cummings goes sleuthing with his blood-brother Keye Luke, who often played the Honolulu detective's eldest offspring.)Unlike Cukor's claustrophobic Gaslight, with Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer, Sleep, My Love is less psychologically nuanced and more plot-driven. It benefits from Hazel Brooks, delivering an icily stylized vamp turn as The Other Woman; she appeared in one other noir, Body and Soul, during her disappointing brief career. George Couloris (the guardian in Citizen Kane) adds color as a confederate of Ameche's, while Raymond Burr is wasted as a minion of the law.That leaves the three principals as well as some problems. The amicable Ameche can't summon up the cold, controlling menace that Boyer spread through Gaslight; his adversary, the equally amicable Cummings, succumbs to terminal blandness. Colbert is more problematic. Unlike the languorous, instinctive Bergman, she made her name in part due to her quick wits; you can't buy her as a submissive wifey who hasn't cottoned on to her husband's philandering -- at the very least -- without having it spelled out to her by Cummings, whose acumen seems as low-wattage as his star power. (On the other hand, she was to find herself in a similar pickle the next year in The Secret Fury.) Sirk's direction here, as in Lured, lacks the distinctiveness he showed in his other noir, Shockproof, and was to develop lushly in the haut-fifties melodramas like Written on the Wind for which he is justly renowned.