Mitchell Leisen’s last significant film, and one of the two he made for MGM (the other, the often dismissed Bedevilled, is not without its merits), is about an efficient and unassuming Montana lawyer (Glenn Ford) who, encouraged by his overbearing wife (a wobbly Ruth Roman), moves his family to Los Angeles. They have been told that in LA everybody plays tennis and that installing pantries in houses has been abandoned in favour of building swimming pools. Swim they must, however – against a flood of small, humiliating disasters. Unable to find work, Ford unwittingly becomes involved with femme fatales and illegal gamblers. When accused of a felony, he has to use his knowledge of the law to defend himself, and Ford’s inherent shy frankness and whispered selfdoubt are exhilarating to watch. There is much to admire in the way the film moves swiftly between cringy and funny, between revelatory and dramatic. This is, like Darling, How Could You!, structured around encounters born of misunderstanding and illusion. LA is a city of falsehood whose citizens exist in a state of perpetual limbo: a French would-be starlet with an unpaid mink coat; a family waiting for their photograph to appear on the cover of a magazine; a mother dreaming of the acting stardom of her son – a boy who does not utter a single word throughout the film. Manny Farber, praising the film’s cheerfully sadistic style and sharply timed humour, noted how it “searches in an unmerciful fashion for the same unique booby traps to make unsuspecting persons indignant, embarrassed, obsessive, or destructive.” Typical of a Leisen film, sexual references gracefully bypass the Code, as when Ford refrains from making love to his wife at 4.20am while contemplating his approaching office hours – in reality, too lazy to move from his own bed to hers. The moment functions as an in-joke about the Code’s requirement for separate marital beds.

Ehsan Khoshbakht