SnoopyStyle Ernie Mott (Cary Grant) is an irresponsible vagrant roaming the streets of London. His father had died in the Great War. His mother (Ethel Barrymore) runs a small shop by herself. He plays the piano, fools around with a gangster's ex Ada Brantline (June Duprez), and has a friendship with nice neighborhood girl Aggie Hunter (Jane Wyatt). After learning about her mother's cancer, he stays to run the shop despite their combative past.Ernie is not really an appealing character and that's tough to do for Cary Grant. I'm also annoyed by his relationship with Ada. I want more time with Aggie and have more love triangle action. The character would be appealing as an exuberant youth struggling to find his way in the world. Cary Grant was 40 by then. I can see this as a lower class melodrama like a Mike Leigh movie but Cary Grant doesn't really fit the role. It's interesting nevertheless.

l_rawjalaurence Based on the novel by Richard Llewellyn, with a script by Clifford Odets (who also directed it), NONE BUT THE LONELY HEART is a socially conscious film, readily recognizable as the work of the author of WAITING FOR LEFTY (a classic social drama of the mid-Thirties), Ernie Mott (Cary Grant) lives in the back-streets of London, trying to eke out an existence while living with his mother (Ethel Barrymore). The two of them fight like cat and dog, but once Ernie discovers that his mother is terminally ill, he vows to stay with her no matter what the consequences. Short of money, Ernie resorts to a life of crime, working for local mobster Jim Mordinoy (George Colouris), and is eventually arraigned by the police after a car-chase (more reminiscent of the streets of Depression-era Chicago than London). Released on bail by a friendly pawnbroker (Konstantin Shayne), Ernie discovers to his horror that his mother, while pretending to lead a respectable life in her own pawn-shop, has also been involved in a life of crime. The two of them are reconciled on her death-bed, but Ernie has to face the future on his own. Although the settings are somewhat stagy, the sincerity of this drama is not in doubt: Odets has a gift for creating memorable sequences, with a clever use of light and shade suggesting Ernie's imprisonment. Although not actually in jail, he cannot escape his existence: the desperate search for money to live on will never end. Nonetheless he resolves to face the future with equanimity - in a time of war, it's important for everyone to forget their individual grievances and pull together. This is suggested in a memorable exchange at the end with Henry Twite (Barry Fitzgerald), as the two of them look down at the River Thames flowing beneath them, and walk to the river- side down a flight of stairs. As Ernie, Grant gets the chance to demonstrate his virtuosity as an actor; normally associated with light comedy, he rarely had the chance to grapple with meatier, tragic roles. The scene where he suddenly discovers the seamier side of life, as he watches the pawnbroker being beaten up by Mordinoy's gang is particularly memorable: Odets repeatedly cuts to reaction-shots of his facial expression gradually changing, and then cuts back to a medium shot as Grant/Ernie fells one of the gang-members who is about to hit a defenseless old man. While NONE BUT THE LONELY HEART is a propaganda peace, released in the penultimate year of World War II, it nonetheless has a social message that can be understood by everyone about the necessity to eliminate poverty by caring for others around us.

MARIO GAUCI This film is renowned for starting off Ethel Barrymore on her belated screen career (after a couple of tryouts made much earlier, including one – the as-yet unwatched RASPUTIN AND THE EMPRESS {1933} – with siblings Lionel and John!); she won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her fine work here – in all, the legendary star would be nominated four times in the 10-year span until her death. Two other notable elements to the movie under review is its being one of only two titles helmed by respected playwright Odets (the other being THE STORY ON PAGE ONE {1959} which, again, I own but still need to go through) and the fact that it landed nominal lead Cary Grant his second and last Academy Award nod (having previously been shortlisted for George Stevens' romantic drama PENNY SERENADE {1941}) until being bestowed with an Honorary "Lifetime Achievement" golden statuette in 1970 (and, in fact, he mentioned these two directors specifically in that speech). The film was based on a novel by Richard Llewellyn, whose "How Green Was My Valley" had just been brought to the screen by John Ford and managed to sweep, or should I say swipe, five Oscars including Best Picture and Direction at the 1942 ceremony: while an undeniably excellent effort, it notoriously triumphed over such superior candidates as the seminal debut of both Orson Welles and John Huston – namely CITIZEN KANE and THE MALTESE FALCON respectively! It is safe to assume that NONE BUT THE LONELY HEART clearly aimed at repeating the success of HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY: while it did garner a total of four nominations (the other two being in the Best Editing and Dramatic/Comedy Score departments), the narrative in this case did not quite have the necessary to obtain a comparable level of quality. Among Llewellyn's other credits were NOOSE (1948), a little-known but pretty good British noir he personally adapted from his play and which co-starred Maltese character actor Joseph Calleia. Anyway, Grant here is a wanderer forever flanked by a pitbull who returns to his London home intending to stay for only a short while, but two events (learning of shopkeeper mother Barrymore's terminal illness – their relationship is otherwise strained – and falling for June Duprez – married to scoundrel George Coulouris) lead to a change of mind and eventually ground him. For the young woman's sake, he becomes embroiled in her husband's criminal schemes (one of their victims being Konstantin Shayne, a close acquaintance of Barrymore's, in a robbery sequence which, along with a car crash later on, constitute action highlights amid the general verbosity) and, to complicate matters further, the old woman is herself arrested for dealing in stolen goods! In the end, while resigning himself to his mother's loss, he follows her advise to find a "good" rather than a "cheap" woman – and he settles on musician Jane Wyatt (the title, in fact, refers to a Tchaikovsky composition she plays on her violin: she had loved him all along, but was willing to sacrifice her personal happiness after Grant professed his feelings for Duprez to her!).Making for unusual wartime fare – which proves interesting without being particularly compelling – the film certainly deserves a mark for trying. Still, the London detail is unconvincing and the cast decidedly variable: the afore-mentioned Grant (rather effective in a rare depiction of his true Cockney origins, apart from the final descent into bathos), Barrymore, Coulouris and Shayne come off best, as well as Barry Fitzgerald (also in HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY and who made Oscar history that same year by being nominated twice for his role in GOING MY WAY – being thus in direct competition with the star in the Best Actor stakes while emerging the winner, and therefore Barrymore's male counterpart, in the Supporting category!); on the other hand, Wyatt and Duprez are somewhat weak under the circumstances, whereas Dan Duryea is thoroughly wasted as a bartender.

writers_reign You'll go a long way to find a greater fan of Cliff Odets than me so I was interested to see how he'd handle a very English story written by a Welshman with a flair for poetic language. Odets himself of course had a poetic way with words but the East Side of New York is more than the geographical three thousand miles from the East End of London. Most of the reviews I've read on IMDb were written by Americans and/or non-English people who, not unnaturally, have no idea how wayward the 'cockney' accents are - Dan Duryea, for example, doesn't even attempt one - and one reviewer even referred to Grant's own background in London when in fact he was born and brought up in Bristol a good two hundred miles away. Despite her failure to master cockney Ethel Barrymore walks away with the acting honours and fully deserved her Best Supporting Actress gong and despite what other reviewers have written I felt that the cast were in three or four different films with no sense of an ensemble at work. Given that he adapted the novel himself and also directed Odets can blame no one but himself for the lack of 'Odets type' dialogue, in fact on only one or two occasions do we hear anything even approaching his trademark speech. On the other hand Odets excelled at chronicling social injustice which is the same the world over and he clearly instructed the cameraman to stress light and shade throughout. Interesting rather than memorable but certainly worth seeing.