Cause for Alarm! (film)

During World War II, Ellen works as a nurse in a naval hospital. While dating Lieutenant Ranney Grahame, a military doctor with a busy schedule that leaves him with little time for her, Ellen meets Ranney's friend George Jones, a pilot. Ellen falls deeply in love with George and marries him after leaving Ranney on amicable terms. When the war ends, Ellen and George move into a suburban Los Angeles neighborhood.

Years later, not all is well with the young couple. George has proven to be selfish, petty, and domineering, and Ellen feels unfulfilled because they have yet to have any children. Despite this, Ellen still loves her husband, and when he begins suffering heart problems, she tirelessly cares for him with the help of Ranney, who periodically visits in his capacity as George's personal physician. During a heat wave, George's illness is exacerbated and he is bedridden. He also becomes increasingly delusional, to the point that Ranney concludes he needs psychological help.

George begins suspecting that Ellen and Ranney are having an affair, and that Ellen is trying to kill him by giving him overdoses of his heart medication. He writes a letter to the district attorney accusing Ellen and Ranney of conspiring to murder him, then gives the letter to Ellen to send in the mail. Ellen dutifully hands the letter to the postman, thinking it is correspondence with their insurance company. When Ellen returns to George's room, she finds him out of bed and manic. He informs his wife of the letter's contents and then brandishes a gun at her, declaring that he has arranged the situation so that he can shoot her and justify it as self-defense. Before George can pull the trigger, however, he collapses on the bed and dies.

Realizing that George's letter could still frame her as his murderer, Ellen rushes out of the house to retrieve it, but obstacle after obstacle gets in her way. She catches up to the postman only for the postman to insist that George must request the letter be returned himself, otherwise Ellen must take the issue up with the supervisor of the local post office before the letter is sent out for delivery. Meanwhile, George's snobbish aunt Clara arrives at the Jones residence to visit George. Ellen manages to return in time to prevent Clara from entering George's bedroom and finding his body, and persuades her to leave by truthfully stating that George did not want to see his aunt, as she had upset him on a previous visit. After tidying up her disheveled appearance in preparation for visiting the post office, Ellen then notices the gun still in George's hand and decides to remove and hide it. It fires a bullet into the floor while the room's window is open, but only the neighbor boy Billy hears and he mistakes it for a toy. Then a notary arrives for an appointment with George, and Ellen sends him away by insisting her husband is too ill to see visitors. As Ellen departs by car, she narrowly avoids running over Billy in her haste. Finally at the post office, the supervisor gives Ellen a form to reclaim the letter that must be signed by George, but by this point Ellen is so frantic and desperate that her behavior irks the supervisor, and he decides to send the letter onward regardless.

Ellen returns home, defeated. When Ranney arrives to check on George's condition, he calms Ellen and enters the bedroom, where he takes stock of his dead friend, the bullet hole in the floor, and the gun in the dresser. After repositioning George's body in the bed, he allows Ellen to explain what happened. When she is finished with her tale, the doorbell rings. Ellen despairs, believing the police have come to arrest her, but opens the door at Ranney's urging. She finds the postman has come to return George's letter due to it having insufficient postage. Ellen is overcome with relief, and Ranney tears up the letter and burns the pieces.

Director Tay Garnett thoroughly prepared both cast and crew and the film was shot in 14 days, a rather tight schedule for the era (Young reportedly used the same pre-production technique for her TV series a few years later).[4] André Previn wrote the score.

Cause for Alarm! is among a few 1950s era MGM films which apparently lapsed into the public domain after their copyrights were not renewed in the 1970s. As with all PD MGM feature-length films produced by the studio itself (and possibly a few they merely distributed), the original film elements are now owned by Turner Entertainment, with distribution rights handled by Warner Bros. (who spoofed the title in one of their 1954 short subject cartoons, Claws for Alarm).

According to MGM records the film earned $518,000 in the US and Canada and $250,000 elsewhere resulting in a loss of $174,000.[2]

Critical response

Loretta Young's performance in the film was praised by both Time magazine and The New York Times when it was released in 1951.

When the film was released in 1951, The New York Times film critic, Bosley Crowther, wrote, "Here a simple situation is turned into a thoroughly chilling business by highlighting the most humdrum staples of the everyday American scene ... Cause for Alarm! proves more than anything else that superior writing, directing and acting - and some imagination - can make a little go a long way ... The suspense, under Director Tay Garnett, mounts steadily, almost unbearably, until a final plot twist so original that it's almost a swindle."

Although Crowther criticized the casting of "newcomer" Bruce Cowling as Ranney, calling his performance "wooden", he had only praise for Young, writing "she does splendidly as the desperate housewife, avoiding all the pitfalls, even in her hysterical breakdown at the end."[8]

Time magazine characterized the film "as the year's first thriller with an honest quota of thrills. It pulls off the old Hitchcock trick of giving commonplace people, events and settings a sinister meaning, and it develops its simple, one-track idea with frightening logic." Time's review also noted the strong supporting performances of Margalo Gillmore and Irving Bacon along with the film's "quiet, sunny atmosphere of a pleasant residential street" in Los Angeles.[9]

However, in later decades the film was widely ignored (falling into the public domain) and the few retrospective reviews were less flattering. François Truffaut's short overview of Cause for Alarm! was kinder than many when he wrote, "But all those effects hit home, perfectly timed, and isn't that what counts?"[10] 21st century reviews have tended towards Truffaut's take along with citing the film's suburban noir setting.

Critic Craig Butler also cites the performances of Gillmore and Bacon, along with describing the cinematography by Joseph Ruttenberg and score by André Previn as "huge pluses."[11] Sean Axmaker calls Cause for Alarm! "An unusual entry into the film noir school of paranoia" which "trades the dark alleys and long shadows of urban menace for the sunny, tree-lined streets of middle-class domesticity" whilst noting, "Young's deadened narration adds an eerie mood of doom to the suburban setting."[12]

• List of films in the public domain in the United States

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Cause for Alarm!.

• Cause for Alarm! at the American Film Institute Catalog
• Cause for Alarm! at IMDb
• Cause for Alarm! at AllMovie
• Cause for Alarm! at the TCM Movie Database
• Cause for Alarm! is available for free viewing and download at the Internet Archive
• Cause for Alarm! film trailer at Turner Classic Movies Media Room