Word: mawkishness
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...Black Chiffon of whatever suspense it has; that, along with the chance it gives people to act, is just about its only virtue. It is one of those triangle stories of the husband, the wife and the offspring treated to a British mixture of the melodramatic, the mawkish and the scandalous. It is Freud for suburban housewives whose buzzing classroom is the Wednesday matinee. Offering theft as an aperitif, it follows up with a seemingly headier and more dangerous brew that is actually rather saccharine and soporific...
...worries about his sick child is pat and overworked, and the important character of the crooked lawyer is trite. And with the death of the hooligan in a Kentucky meadow, his head nuzzled by the horses he longed to see again, Huston gives a hard-bitten film a surprisingly mawkish ending...
John Forsythe looks like Fonda, speaks with Fonda's flat drawl, and apparently lacks only experience to handle his part as well as Fonda. He underplays throughout, as he must to keep the popular Lieutenant from appearing mawkish; he carries the long, slow opening scenes with easy competence...
What spoils this film is stilted direction and lack of continuity. The incidents appear choppy, and the final one--in an old ladies' home--is almost mawkish in its sentimentality. The picture needs a director like Frank Capra: someone who can be heartwarming and hypersentimental and get away with...
...great flaw in the movie is the music, which is tuneless, mawkish, and worthless. Bing, though a peerless song plugger, is left this time with a carload of goldbricks. He receives adequate and on pitch assistance from his leading lady, Rhonda Fleming, but as we said before, two times nothing is still nothing...