The greatest movie ever!

How sad is this?

A Brilliant Conflict

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

Recently viewed this on TCM and was captivated. What was going to happen? Why was Barbara Stanwyck sneaking about? Where was her husband? What had happened??Errol Flynn also stars, and he was good. Don't usually see him in many suspense films that I remember. Barbara S. was amazing as usual. Believable - and wouldn't want to mess with her - but she's met her match with Flynn.I thought a very good plot from which I have seen picked up in several other more recent movies. A solid "8" from this reviewer. I think you'll be entertained.

I think this movie is highly underrated. Errol Flynn and Barbara Stanwyck have great chemistry and both turned in superb performances. It's too bad they didn't make more movies together. I'm not sure why so many people think this an average movie at best, unless they can't see Errol Flynn as anything but a swashbuckler. I feel he had tremendous range as an actor. Even Bette Davis who had bashed Errol Flynn's acting abilities for decades admitted later in her life that Errol was "damn good!!" I recommend this to anyone who enjoys classic old movies, especially those who enjoy scary movies. One last note of interest is that I believe this may have been the last movie where Barbara Stanwyck's hair length goes past her shoulders.

Just saw this last night for the first time. Must say that I loved Stanwyck running, leaping, jumping, being thrown by a horse, springing up again only to leap from an eight foot fence to the ground...This was clearly no stunt double. The gal was fleet of foot, and tenacious. She loved playing tough cookies, and that's what she served up here, a tough cookie who was really heroic and unafraid. She, as opposed to Flynn, does all the swashbuckling in this movie, and it's worth seeing just for that reason alone.And it was suspenseful...I was really quite frightened of what she would find in the lab, in the lodge, in the dumb waiter...what's that about the cold cream??? I was so edgy after she scaled the fence into the lodge compound and got lost, that I had to turn off the volume so as not to hear the scary music. So the score really REALLY adds to the suspense.I loved Errol Flynn in his early swashbucklers, and I really liked the character turns he took in Too Much Too Soon, and The Sun Also Rises and That Forsythe Woman. But here, he's just uneven..sometimes even blank, and then other times he's okay. Clearly the writers were trying to create a Max de Winter or Edward Rochester-type character ...is he good, or bad, sincere or lying? But the execution of the idea doesn't gel enough to satisfy.So, the writing's choppy and shallow (especially the last 2 lines of dialogue and resolution), and there's not a TON of chemistry between Flynn and Stanwyck. And yes, the other roles are either over, or under written, so you end up with shadows or stereotypes. But still, I found it fun, and there's no reason why NOT to watch this movie, unless Rebecca or Jane Eyre or Pat & Mike is playing on another channel.

I think it is generally acknowledged that Errol Flynn's best film work was in those films that combined his charm and his athletic abilities, be they swashbucklers, boxing films, or westerns. But as he got older Flynn was determined to prove his acting abilities. He could act when he was generally interested in the film he appeared in, but he was frequently willing to try to do a film that was unusual. This did not always work too well. He made such interesting failures as THE SISTERS with Bette Davis, where he was a newspaper reporter in turn of the century San Francisco, who had a wanderjahr that interfered with his marriage. The film wasn't bad, but his part was weak - the antithesis of the type he usually played so well. In the late 1940s to 1950 he tried three films to broaden his scope of acting: CRY WOLF, THAT FORSYTE WOMAN, and SILVER RIVER. Only the last one, a western where he played a man who was carried away by ambitious and greed so that he becomes relatively unsympathetic, was successful. THAT FORSYTE WOMAN (with Greer Garson and Walter Pigeon) was interesting (Flynn as Soames Forsythe was interesting casting, but he was too stiff - Eric Porter's memorable Soames in the first BBC version of the Galsworthy stories in the 1960s was far more human). CRY WOLF, the present film, was Flynn's only real attempt at the noir style of movie. As such it begins well, but collapses due to a poor script.Barbara Stanwyck has married Richard Basehart, the nephew of Flynn, before the movie began. Flynn, Basehart, Jerome Cowan, and Geraldine Brooks are the scions of a "Kennedy" style family, with money and political power (Cowan is a U.S. Senator). But Basehart has vanished, and Stanwyck, besides trying to prove her marriage, is determined to find her husband. And here she keeps running into Flynn's suspicious behavior. He seems very unsympathetic to her wishes, and quite cold most of the time. As for helping her locate Basehart, he keeps on throwing up roadblocks.The problem is that having set a good stage for a film which would have been confronting Stanwyck's heroine with Flynn's villain, the script fell apart. It turns out Flynn is interested in protecting the family's name and it's members from outside scrutiny. In particular Basehart and Brooks, who are somewhat strange. This change in the script was meant to enable Stanwick and Flynn to gradually fall in love and end up together, but it smashed the suspense that such a film should generate, and it ruined Flynn from having a potentially interesting negative part. Actually his performance in SILVER RIVER was far more consistent, and even his Soames retains the audience's lack of sympathy to the end. In CRY WOLF the audience gets confused - should we hiss Flynn or cheer him on? It would have been better all around if the screenplay writers had let us hiss him to the end.