TALK ABOUT A STRANGER
US, 1952, 68 minutes, Black-and-white.
George Murphy, Nancy Davis, Billy Grey, Lewis Stone, Kurt Kaznar.
Directed by David Bradley
This is a short, moralising film, supporting feature from 1952, the McCarthy? era.
George Murphy had a successful career as a song and dance man, especially at MGM, but gave up his show business career for Californian politics, becoming a senator. His wife here is played by Nancy Davis who was to marry Ronald Reagan and become the First Lady of the US. The young Billy Grey gives an intense performance as their son, obsessed with a stranger whom he accuses of poisoning his dog.
The stranger is played by Kurt Kaznar and Lewis Stone appears as the newspaper editor of the town. A strong cast, with Murphy doing his sympathetic thing but Nancy Davis having a rather lacklustre role as the pregnant mother, mainly reacting to her son and husband.
With the California setting, the film shows the orange growers, the difficulties with the weather, with the cold, burning fires at night, the need for fuel and the difficulties in transport. This reaches a crisis point when the young boy, Robert, in anger against the stranger empties all the stranger’s oil just when his father and fellow orange growers needed.
The film shows a happy American family, the young boy rather precocious, especially in his vocabulary.
But the focus is on a dog and the boy’s affection for it, suddenly finding it dead. Because the boy had called on the stranger at Halloween and had disliked him, Robert immediately concludes that the stranger has poisoned his dog, goes to visit him, is physically aggressive, is psychologically obsessed, can’t be told anything, reacting badly to his parents, especially his father. His father advises him that he needs evidence and so he discusses the case with the editor and goes to try to find evidence – including an address for a doctor that the editor had rung. There is a strange episode where Robert encounters a young boy, goes into what is called a haunted house, but is, in fact, the house of the doctor – there is a later explanation of how he had operated on his son who had died on the operating table and he had bought the property next to the Orange farm for seclusion.
After the fiasco with the oil, Robert runs away, falls into a stream but is rescued by the stranger, warmed and fed, with Robert mellowing. Afterwards, the editor is able to provide more information concerning a man wanting to poison the coyotes and putting out poisoned meat and Robert’s dog eating it and dying.
One hopes that Robert has learned his lesson.
