Tonight’s surprising fare was The Man in the Net (1959), starring Alan Ladd and Carolyn Jones as a couple under strain as Alan pursues his poverty-stricken painting muse, and her muse, being wealth and all it can bring in meaningless chit chat, is rapidly breaking up in inchoate pieces. The actor behind the painter, Ladd, evidently played the entire movie from his hospital bed in the local ICU, for nothing else explains his wooden delivery and a face stricken of all expression, even boredom; I shiver even now to contemplate how little his mouth could move.
But when Carolyn’s body is dug out from beneath a woodpile, his character is assisted in his subsequent straits by a local pack of children, and they bolster a show we nearly turned off in the first five minutes, as, innocent as they first seem, they soon provide hollow echoes of the deceit bedeviling the little town of Stoneville, manipulative and deceitful, if in an innocent, forthright way. The town’s very curtains of bucolic happiness slowly slide away to show us the murderous vigilantes lurking in every country store corner, even including those representatives of law enforcement who merely use the mob to fulfill their official duties; moral remonstrances are quite beyond the pale for these creatures of (I hope to titter not) the law.1
As I commented to our Arts Editor, if the youngster named Angel is not convicted of the crime alleged in this drama, surely she will be convicted in the next; she has all the grace and subtley of Nero at his worst. Yet, with some seriousnes, we speculated as to the power behind the throne: was it her older sister, Emily? Or her doll who saw all, Louise?
Coincidentally, Angel was played by a St. Paul actress by the name of Susan Gordon, who was aged ten at the time.
All in all, for all of its wobbly start, it held our attention from commercial abyss to commercial abyss, and we watched it in its entirety in a single evening, a rare feat for us.
1I will refrain from superfluous comparisons to certain political parties.
