Simply A Masterpiece

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

The plot isn't so bad, but the pace of storytelling is too slow which makes people bored. Certain moments are so obvious and unnecessary for the main plot. I would've fast-forwarded those moments if it was an online streaming. The ending looks like implying a sequel, not sure if this movie will get one

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

This moderately successful film noir was directed by Robert Stevenson, who is best known for his famous hit MARY POPPINS (1964). He also directed DISHONORED LADY (1947, see my review) and THE WOMAN ON PIER 13 ((1949, see my review), not to mention 59 other films. The film was billed as a kind of successor to THE THIRD MAN (1949, see my review) of the same year, simply because the same two leads were cast together, namely the alluring and fascinating Alida Valli and Joseph Cotten. But the magic is not there. Valli does her best, but Joseph Cotten seems tired, detached, and there is no chemistry between them this time. (Maybe they had ceased to get along?) So the producers were trying to build on the previous success of these two people, and with such clearly exploitative motives, such projects generally fail. When I was 16 years old, I knew Manny Seff, joint author of the story upon which the film was based. It was his last film. He was such an amusing, whimsical man who liked to make jokes. He was very good company, though rather quiet and unassertive in his manner. The film concerns a beautiful young woman, played by Valli, who has been paralysed because of a skiing accident and is confined to a wheelchair. She is naturally deeply depressed, and all the men who had been chasing her have lost their interest in her. Three years earlier, the film BEWARE OF PITY (1946), based on the famous novel by Stefan Zweig, had proved that a film about a beautiful young woman in a wheelchair (Lily Palmer in that instance) could be a commercial success. So the producers must have felt it was OK to put Valli in one, as all would be well. As far as Valli's part of the story went, all was well. She was wholly convincing and elicits our sympathy without demanding pity. But the rest of the film which swirls around her does not really work. Joseph Cotten is a very unsuitable candidate for playing a compulsive gambler and card shark, turned thief, who is on the run. That is just not 'him'. From the very beginning of the film, as we watch the calculating Cotten assume a false identity in Valli's home town, we just do not believe the film at all. His attempts to appear cold and calculating merely make him seem wrong for the part, which he was. Any man spending all that time with the beautiful Valli simply could not behave with such indifference to her obvious charms, especially when she keeps looking at him like that and tells him that she loves him. The film is ruined by being hopelessly unconvincing. Good try, shame about that.

The trouble with this Stranger is that it walks too softly. I agree with others: the movie is too low-key for its own good. Unfortunately, the narrative straddles a number of movie genres— romance, crime, regeneration, noir— without blending them into a compelling whole. At the same time, the parts are stretched out at such a leisurely pace, it's sometimes hard to stay involved. Then too, Cotten is a master of subtlety and can play a nuanced psycho as in Shadow of a Doubt (1943) to perfection. Here, however, he doesn't supply the kind of tough- guy edge of a petty criminal and stick-up man at those moments when they should surface. As a result, we never see the side of his personality that's in conflict with his charming, sociable side. Cotten's performance is perfect for the romantic side, but not for the tough- guy criminal side. Thus, the reform that comes at the end lacks the contrast and dramatic impact it needs. All in all, I think the film works best as a romantic tale of moral regeneration. The screenplay could have deepened this approach by making Hale (Cotten) a con-man gigolo instead of a violent criminal, that is, a man who is reformed by coming home to his first and one true love, Elaine (Valli). For one, that would have eliminated the ridiculous sequence where, as reviewer cutterccbaxter notes, Hale takes three slugs in the back while in a rolling car, yet emerges in the next scene with his arm in a sling! My guess is that the film was rushed into production to cash in on the success of the Valli-Cotten teaming in The Third Man. The result, however, is a Luke-warm mix at best.

On the run gambler, con man Chris Hale Joseph Cotton inveigles his way into a small All- American town to lie low for awhile. He charms his way into the good graces of locals and begins a relationship with a local shoe titan's wheel chair bound daughter (Valli). While he envisions starting anew in this town he can't resist making one more big score by ripping off a vicious thug. The theft is cleanly pulled off and Hale disappears back to his small community where he has assumed another identity. Unfortunately his unstable partner in the robbery tracks him down and from here things begin to unravel. Fresh from their Third Man pairing Joseph Cotton and Valli made this stylish little noir that at times evokes masterworks of the genre such as Shadow of a Doubt and Out of the Past. It has some tightly edited and well filmed suspenseful moments and Cotton as always gives a strong understated performance. Valli on the other hand is still in her post war Vienna funk so enigmatic in Third Man but dull and lifeless here. Upbeat Spring Byington and especially surly and troubled Paul Stewart provide effective opposite examples of the human condition that pull at Hale's conscience. Unfortunately in it's final scene, Walk Softly Stranger takes advice from its title and signs off with a mawkish tacked on ending that obliterates the impact of the previous scene which is infinitely more compatible to the overall doomed mood of story and character.

A sad little film noir wrapped inside a sad little love story (or vice versa), Walk Softly, Stranger maintains a subdued integrity of tone throughout. You wish it would get a move on, or that the exchanges were snappier, or the rhythms quirkier. But, no, and at the end, you have to admit that, on its own modest terms, it succeeds. Into the heartland of Ohio drifts grifter Joseph Cotten to settle down in one of those small cities that used to be famous for something – in this case, it's the headquarters of Corelli Shoes, where he wangles himself a job. Cotten lets on that he's returning to the home town he ran away from years before – even taking up room and board with Spring Byington, a widow who now owns what used to be his house. But it's all a lie (or at least seems to be; the script sends mixed messages on this point). He's researched the history of the house and the widow, and also that of the Corelli heiress (Valli; she had dropped the `Alida'), a lonely rich girl crippled in a skiing accident. He hopes to romance her so as to be sitting pretty for the rest of his days – his ultimate con job. But he ends up falling for her.Cotten's Achilles heel, however, has always been his professional vanity, and he can't pass up one last job – robbing a mob boss of his casino's take. The job succeeds, but his certified loser of an accomplice (Paul Stewart), now down and out, tracks him down and blows both their covers. They're both marked men....Walk Softly, Stranger, opts for a bittersweet, romantic ending rather than a terminal blow-out, and that's in keeping with all that goes before. But problems remain. Cotten's performance reminds us, in its watered-down way, of his Uncle Charlie in Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt, while Valli has little to do but stay tragically, enigmatically glamorous. (The most memorable performances come from Byington and Stewart, and the movie is notable for preserving one of the few appearances on film of Jack Paar, who was to imprint The Tonight Show with his particular personality in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s). It's a strange, flawed movie whose elegiac tone stays with you.