Film

Movie theaters, reviews and showtimes in New York, plus articles, trailers and more
 

Cause for Alarm! (1951)

Director: Tay Garnett

Average user rating
No reviews

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

A not uninteresting attempt at a suburban film noir, with Loretta Young as a housewife whose bed-ridden ex-serviceman husband (Sullivan), consumed with totally unfounded jealousy, concocts a fiendish revenge plot. Having planted evidence indicating that she and her supposed lover were conspiring to poison him, he then proposes to shoot her, but dies of a heart attack. Although rather too fluttery for comfort, Young gives a good account of the woman's panic-stricken dilemma as, left alone with a corpse in the house and her every move adding to the web of suspicious circumstances, she desperately battles red tape to retrieve an incriminating letter posted to the DA. Unfortunately, the script throws in some heavy-handed exposition (notably a 'meeting cute' scene designed to shed light on Sullivan's mental state), betrays its MGM origins by a tiresome insistence on family values (a moppet next door stands in for the child the heroine yearns for), and contrives a risibly arbitrary happy ending.

Author: TM 0000-00-00 00:00:00

Time Out Film Guide

  • Print this page
  • Send to a friend

What do you think?
Post your review now

clear rating
Min 1 star. Zero stars will be treated as unrated.

*mandatory fields


Cast & crew

Director: Tay Garnett

Producer: Tom Lewis

Cast: Loretta Young, Barry Sullivan, Bruce Cowling, Margalo Gillmore, Irving Bacon, Don Haggerty, Richard Anderson full cast

Genre(s): Film Noir

Duration: 74 mins


Features

Making a name for himself

Making a name for himself

Sin Nombre's Cary Joji Fukunaga learned his lessons well.

To the letter

Forty years later, Costa-Gavras's Z still brims with fury.

Mind over matter

David Cronenberg reflects on a most bizarre body: his own corpus of work.

Fool's gold

Can an Oscar win lead to a cursed career? Here are five stories of postaward professional meltdowns.

We are the championed

Terrorists and teens abound in this year's "Film Comment Selects."

A history of violence

Matteo Garrone's kaleidoscopic Gomorrah wallops you with Italy's crime crisis.

True romantic

James Gray exchanges urban amorality for amour in Two Lovers.

Playing in the dark

MoMA salutes pianist Stuart Oderman's 50 years as the one-man sound of silents.

Junk bonds

Cast and crew recall the making of the classic NYC drug drama The Panic in Needle Park.