Perfect cast and a good story

best movie i've ever seen.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

In the old days of Hollywood, glamorous leading ladies were finished getting starring roles around age 30. Many times they were reduced to horror films, badly produced B movies, and television. If they want to strip their glamour and gain weight, they could do character roles. However, Joan Crawford, whose contract was terminated by MGM at the age of 35, continued to make good films throughout the '40s and into the early '50s. One of them was this one, Sudden Fear, for which she served as executive producer. In that capacity, she chose the screenwriter, the actors, the director, the composer, the cinematographer - and they were all top drawer.The story concerns Myra Hudson, a woman born into a wealthy family who became a successful playwright. She marries an actor, Lester Blaine (Jack Palance) and then realizes that he and his mistress (Gloria Grahame) are plotting to kill her.Crawford registers the bliss of new love, the pain of betrayal, hysteria, and then the steel to pull herself together and take action. Really it is one of her best roles. This is a woman who knew how to play to her strengths.Sudden Fear is exciting, suspenseful, atmospheric, and highly entertaining. Of course, if I saw Jack Palance and Gloria Grahame together, I'd know something was up. The first choices for the Lester role were Gable and Marlon Brando. Palance is excellent as a masculine, romantic man hiding a violent and psychopathic personality. As his flirtatious mistress Irene, Grahame is perfect.While there is no actual sex, there is a lot of raw desire and innuendo in this film.The end of the film has very little dialogue, and you'll be glued to the screen.It's sad to see once great stars like Lana Turner, Merle Oberon, and others reduced to poor circumstances in film, and sadder still that they knew that once they were at the top of the heap. Crawford at least fought the good fight and in Sudden Fear proved that she was still a force.

Sudden Fear appealed to me right away as a fan of film-noir, classic film and thrillers. It does get off to a slow start with some uneventful storytelling and parts that could easily have been trimmed, but when it gets going it is just an excellent film, as a film-noir, thriller and a film in general, with a riveting and very suspenseful second half in particular.The costumes and sets are sumptuous and the lighting gives the right amount of chills in the appropriate places. Visually, most impressive was the cinematography(nominated for an Oscar for a good reason), the film is just exquisitely shot and one of the best-looking film-noirs of the early 50s. The dream sequence and the whole second half, reminiscent of the ending of The Third Man, stood out in this regard. Elmer Bernstein's score is hauntingly dynamic and sends chills up the spine sometimes while the film also has a literate script that doesn't hesitate in making the characters interesting and expertly direction.Joan Crawford is superb in the lead role, classic Crawford really and wholly deserving of the Oscar nomination, while Gloria Grahame lights up the screen in a deliciously sultry performance and Jack Palance- also nominated- shows very well early in his career how good he could be in sinister roles(he was also Oscar-nominated for Shane a year later, which I did admittedly did find a much better performance). All in all, starts slow but ends rivetingly, an excellent film noir with the cinematography being especially good. 8/10 Bethany Cox

Seen today, sixty years later, this comes across as an out-and-out meller with some serious flaws - midnight in San Francisco and not a soul on the streets, and not just ONE street but several. When you start noticing things like that while the film is still RUNNING (and these are climactic scenes, the very last reel when, if everybody is doing their job, we should be so caught up in the action that we don't notice things like that) it's a sure sign that something is wrong and not JUST sloppy writing though that, of course, is where it starts. It's in a tradition of 'revenge' movies where a 'creative' person is rejected in the first reel and sets out to even the score (for a fine example see the French film 'The Page Turner' where a promising child pianist loses out on a scholarship because one of the judges is preoccupied; time passes, the child grows up and lands a job in the judge's household and guess what), in this case actor Jack Palance is set for the lead in author Crawford's new play; everyone likes him, director, producer, but author Crawford says no and Palance is back on the street. Next thing they're married and he's plotting with his real love, Gloria Grahame, to give Crawford the business and wind up with her fortune - she is, natch, a millionairess on the side. Of its ilk its well done if you don't count the risible deserted Frisco and probably had much more impact in fifty two. Worth seeing but not a keeper.

In real-life Hollywood mega-star, Joan Crawford (aka Mommie Dearest) may have been a lousy mother to her adopted children, but, when it came to being a performer in custom-made vehicles like "Sudden Fear", she was the consummate actress, giving everything that she's got and even earning for herself an Oscar nomination for "Best Actress".In this intense, emotionally-charged, 1952 Thriller/Chick Flick Crawford played successful playwright, Myra Hudson, who, in a whirl of infatuation, up and marries the young, no-talent actor, Lester Blaine, only to find her bubble of bliss ready to burst when she inadvertently discovers that her stud-muffin and his snotty girlfriend are, indeed, plotting out her murder.This well-paced, lushly photographed film, with its superb cast, literally, had me on the edge of my seat during its climatic finale.