The Man I Love

“I’d make you sing the blues, honey.”
“I’ll take that chance.”

Petey Brown (Ida Lupino) leaves her singing gig in New York to see her family in Los Angeles.  Brother Joey (Warren Douglas) works in a nightclub run by sleazy womanizer Nicky Toresca (Robert Alda).  Sister Sally slings hash in Toresca’s uncle’s restaurant, and finds herself fending off his advances.  Her husband Roy (John Ridgely) is in the VA hospital, recovering from shellshock and a nervous breakdown that leaves him tormented with jealous delusions.  Youngster sister Ginny (Martha Vickers) doesn’t have much interest in dating or going out, but she nurses a crush on neighbor Johnny (Don McGuire).  Johnny works his fingers to the bone trying to please his trampy, selfish wife Gloria (Dolores Moran), who comes on to Nicky while her husband works the night shift.  As if that wasn’t enough story, Petey gets a job singing at Nicky’s place.  Nicky tries to woo her, but she falls for gifted piano player San Thomas (Bruce Bennett), a man still hung up on his socialite ex-wife.

Whew, that’s a lot of setup.  Especially for a story that doesn’t really go anywhere.  Despite all the characters, it primarily focuses on the Lupino-Bennett relationship, although the McGuire-Moran subplot gets some quality screen time and is the most interesting part of the film.  Also the most noir-like… otherwise the movie is a soapy melodrama with a slightly noir attitude.  It’s a melancholy view on damaged romance, but not a particularly cynical or fatalistic one. 

Lupino makes the best of the mediocre material, delivering some pretty hacky lines with more conviction than they deserve.  As in Road House and Private Hell 36, she gets to sing a couple of numbers… or rather, lip-sync, since the voice belongs to someone else.  The take on the Gershwin title tune is okay, though once you’ve heard Billie Holiday do it, nothing else compares.  Of the remaining cast, Alda is appropriately slimy and Moran shines in the meaty bad girl role.  The others are merely passable.  Bennett’s mopiness gets boring pretty fast, but he manages to sell the tortured artist thing well enough so that we can believe Lupino falling for him.

There wasn’t much here for me to get excited about, but Lupino is always a pleasure to watch (and she’s looking fantastic here in a series of snazzy gowns) and the Moran story has some highlights.  Rating: Fair (61)

IMDb