Howard Horner brings a baroque sensibility to both the design and the blocking, and cinematographer George E. Diskant's deep focus photography imbues the film with all the hallmarks of noir and women-in-peril picture.

An unpleasant woman-in-peril crime thriller.

The Man, The Play & The Actor. We are in a small town, a homely widow (Ida Lupino) hires a handyman (Robert Ryan) to look after her house. She soon starts to regret it as Ryan grows erratic by the hour, it appears that she is host to a dangerous schizophrenic, and now she is unable to escape her house. Beware, My Lovely is adapted from Mel Dinelli's (The Spiral Staircase) story and play called "The Man". Pretty much a one set movie and a two character driven piece, the film boasts two great central performances and offers up an interesting take on mental illness. One however shouldn't be fooled into thinking this is a violent and nerve shredding picture, because it isn't. It's clear from the get go that Ryan's Howard Wilton is a dangerously troubled man, but this is a different sort of "peril" movie, one that throws up another slant on psychosis and thus making it difficult to hate our dangerous protagonist. Ryan and Lupino are a great combination, they had also done the excellent, and far better, On Dangerous Ground this same year. So with both actors clearly comfortable together, it brings out a finely tuned character story all based in the confines of one house or prison as it were. Ryan is particularly strong as his character flits in and out of madness, with some scenes powerful and at times inducing fear, while at others garnering deep sympathy. The direction from Harr…

Robert Ryan is effectively menacing in this drama of a loner ("Wilton") who takes a job as a factotum at the home of the sympathetic, recently widowed "Helen" (Ida Lupino). He suffers from a paranoia that leads him to believe that everyone is against him - and given the suspicious-looking opening scenes of the movie, that includes the audience too. When she finds herself alone in the house with him, the doors and windows locked and the telephone ripped from it's socket - we all begin to fear for her safety. Ryan was frequently quite a wooden actor, but here he cleverly portrays the character with much more psychology to his sense of threat that just the sheer physical (though there is a little of that, too). Harry Horner manages to build the sense of peril really quite well, interspersed only by a few interruptions by visiting kids who might, or might not, offer her a route to safety from the prison that is her own home. The ending is also interesting - not quite what you might expect, either. Lupino and Ryan work well together, here - it's well worth the watch.