Review of Come Back, Little Sheba (1953) by Edith N — 29 Nov 2007

There are people on IMDB who are blaming Doc's alcoholism on the fact that his wife never prepares him a hot lunch and doesn't do enough housework. This, to me, shows a clear lack of understanding of the disease of alcoholism. I'm also kind of irked by the person who refers to this as a "period piece" in their review. Since it was filmed in approximately the same time as it was set, it is assuredly not a period piece.

Doc is an alcoholic. His wife is a whiner. They've got a boarder who's being led astray by one of the men at her college. It's all very sordid. The "Little Sheba" of the title is Lola's--that's Doc's wife's--dog, who's been missing since before the movie started and who never comes back. I spent large amounts of the movie expecting it to turn out that Doc had killed it in a drunken fit, but no such luck.

Actually, I'm not entirely sure what drives Doc to his final binge. Maybe it's the idea that Marie--the boarder--may live a better life than his. Maybe it's the thought that she won't. Or maybe it was just time; maybe he just couldn't hold back any longer. But he seems not to have done anything too bad until he got home.

Honestly, I don't really care about these people. Shirley Booth won an Academy Award for her performance here, and I can only assume that it was a bad year for actresses. (But I know that Maureen O'Hara wasn't even nominated for [i]The Quiet Man[/i] nor Grace Kelly for [i]High Noon[/i], and those were both better performances!) Terry Moore, who played Marie, was nominated for Best Supporting Actress, but she did [i]not[/i] win. Which is good; it isn't a particularly challenging performance. She spends a minute or two fighting off "Turk"--one hopes that isn't his real name--but that's about it. Burt Lancaster gives the best performance in the film, but of course he wasn't nominated for anything.

I'm not sure why I finished watching this. I've been watching some real turkeys, and this one is definitely in that category. It's a pointless, hopeless melodrama; even its moral is confused. I [i]think[/i] it's warning against the evils of drink, but it also seems to be warning against the evils of having ever been young and pretty and then being neither. And while it's possible to avoid it, it's not necessarily a solution that most people want to take.