Cause for Alarm! (1951)

Loretta Young is phenomenal in this gripping dramatic thriller. The film is highly suspenseful and will keep you on the edge of your seat, eyes glued to the set as we watch Young going through emotions and frantically trying to get back a letter.Young plays Ellen Jones a happy housewife who is in-love with her husband George. When her husband George takes ill due to a heart condition he starts imagining his wife and his best friend & doctor, Ranney Grahame, are conspiring to kill him. George writes a letter one day and asks his wife to mail it for him, she does so and once it's confirmed that she mailed it he proceeds to tell her what was written in that letter to the D.A.'s office. George decides that he will kill is wife and let the D.A. deal with Dr. Grahame but he dies of heart failure before he can shoot her and now it's up to Mrs. Jones to get the letter back before it's too late.10/10

I generally like Loretta Young, but unfortunately this script requires such dumb behavior on her part, that I found myself getting angry with her stupidity rather than the clumsy machinations of the villain.Barry Sullivan is largely wasted in this one note performance, he was so good in Tension.Irving Bacon adds some much-needed comic relief as a whiny postman who talks the ears off everyone on his route.A similar story and situation has been brought to life far more enjoyably in Sorry, Wrong Number and Gaslight which I highly recommend.Although the film is only 74 minutes long, it still seems to drag. There are some drawn-out scenes with a neighbor kid on a trike who I guess was supposed to add a cuteness factor, but didn't really advance the plot at all.

Loretta Young plays a woman whose husband (Barry Sullivan) has a heart condition and is bed-ridden. She doesn't realize it but her husband believes she is having an affair with his doctor and longtime friend (Bruce Cowling). He mails a letter to the district attorney, telling a wild story about how the two are plotting to kill him. He then tells Young what he has done and promptly keels over of a heart attack! Young is panic-stricken and desperate to get that letter back before she is wrongly accused of her husband's murder.I'm not sure why this movie has always stood out to me but it has. I enjoy it tremendously. Loretta Young is terrific, especially when she starts to freak out. But even before that she has this nervous quality about her performance that makes the later panic seem in keeping with her character. Some have criticized her character as being unduly stupid in order to service the plot. I don't feel this is true. Everything hits her quickly. Within a matter of minutes she hears what her husband planned and then he dies, so naturally she wouldn't be thinking clearly. Barry Sullivan gives one of his best performances as the crazy husband. Contrary to what some reviews have stated, he did not exhibit a sudden change of behavior from nice guy to psycho nor was his psychosis brought on by his heart medicine. The film shows in flashbacks that this man is self-serving, possessive, and manipulative. Further, Sullivan tells Young a story from his childhood that paints a clear picture that he has always been disturbed.This is a wonderfully subversive suspense film. Here you have this crazy story going on in a typical suburban American home during a decade in which the idyllic picture of American suburbia was born. My advice is to pay full attention to the film for answers to many of the nitpickers' complaints. I can think of far more respected and beloved films with plots that are full of more contrivances than anything in this. In my opinion, this is a real treat that builds slowly then grips you and doesn't let go. One of my favorite films of the '50s.

With all the positive spin put on this flick by the reviewers on this board I felt I might have missed something. But I think not. There have been film attempts by husbands to drive their wives crazy (1940's "Gaslight" and 1958's "The Screaming Skull"), but here you actually have a crazy husband (Barry Sullivan) trying to implicate his wife (Loretta Young) and personal physician (Bruce Cowling) with an illicit love affair. Something interesting could have been made with this concept, but once old George spills his guts to Ellen about the letter to the DA, the whole thing starts to unravel.Seriously, the guy was a basket case. All the good Doc would have to have done is put George in the hospital for observation and kept a set of notes. Having wife Ellen go apoplectic over retrieving the letter from the postman on the beat struck me as one of the prime examples of government bureaucracy gone completely out of control. COME ON - this was 1950's small time America. You can cite all the regulations you want, but do you actually believe the mail carrier you know by name wouldn't hand you back a letter you gave him just a few minutes ago? This postman was unbelievable, I mean, WHO WOULD KNOW if he handed her the letter back? The guy carried on like he would be off to the federal penitentiary. This was made even more hysterical later on with the supervisor who wanted all manner of forms and signatures filled out.But poor old Ellen, she just kept digging her hole deeper and deeper as the story went on. Like trying to pry the gun from George's cold, dead hand. What??? Now her fingerprints are on it, and the gun has been fired! Her goose would really have been cooked if the bullet hit George in the head. Wouldn't that have been something? Even Dr. Grahame would have been running for cover by that time.You know what had me more amused? The little kid on the bike in the Hoppy outfit. I thought with some certainty that that was Alfalfa from the Little Rascals until I realized the math on his age couldn't have worked. Then who shows up later? Alfalfa Switzer himself helping his buddy fool with the hot rod. How does that work? Look, I don't want to bad mouth the film too seriously. Loretta Young does a competent job with a loser of a script. But there are an inordinate amount of viewers here calling the picture film noir, and that it certainly is not. This one might better be classified under the heading of Postage Due.