When Lola is talking to Doc in bed about Sheba's disappearance, her right arm alternately jumps from being under her head, near her right cheek and hanging off the side of the bed.
When Doc is pouring orange juice for the teenager, he grabs her right wrist and pours juice into the glass as she holds it, but in the long shot he has taken the glass from her and fills it himself before returning the glass to her.
When Doc kisses Lola after lecturing her about spying on the teenagers, his right arm dangles limply as Lola grasps his upper arm.
A split second later, it is he that has grabbed Lola's arm and holds her by the upper arm.
When Burt Lancaster comes home, the boarder's sweater is lying on the newel post at the foot of the staircase.
He puts his hand on it.
When he come back down to the kitchen, and back up again, it's no longer there.
When Doc takes the bottle from the kitchen cabinet, inexplicably there is no knob on the left hand door.
When Lola opens the cabinet to check on the bottle, the knob is there and she uses it to open the same door.
Daniel Mann directed this emotionally bruising screen adaptation of the William Inge play.Shirley Booth recreated her stage performance opposite Burt Lancaster, as a dowdy housewife stuck in the past, who's so devoted to taking care of every single need of her alcoholic husband that she's forgotten she has a life of her own to live.
Heavyweight contemporary drama adapted from the successful play by William Inge documenting the unhappy, childless marriage of Burt Lancaster and Shirley Booth's Doc and Lola. After marrying young, when Lola accidentally became pregnant, the viewer understands that any spark in their marriage disappeared when she lost the child and couldn't have another.
The film's odd combination of staginess and 1950s sexual mores and social conventions makes for a mildly interesting but very dated take on marriage, aging, alcoholism, and sex. The dialogue is talky, overly expository, and not terribly involving, and the Alcoholics Anonymous subplot feels awkward and tacked on.
Daniel Mann's director debut, a screen adaptation of William Inge's eponymous play debuted in 1950, stage thespian Shirley Booth reprises her Tony-winning role in the movie, which not only marks her screen debut at the age of 54, but wins her a coveted BEST LEADING ACTRESS Oscar too.Lola Delaney (Booth) is a middle-aged housewife, her life seems to be on the right track except that her little puppy Sheba has disappeared several months ago, his husband Doc (Lancaster), a former alcoholic, has been sober for a whole year, which is something worth celebrating in the AA meeting, and now she finds a new boarder, an attractive college student Marie Buckholder (Moore), who seems to be quite open-faced and spirited to move in immediately.
What a downer. Burt is a recovering alcoholic married to Shirley Booth, a mindless optimist who lives in the past and can't seem to simply SHUT UP.
One thing for sure—the film certainly goes against the glamorous 50's mold. Probably no movie from that prettified period is as dour as this one, from the dowdy Lola to the grim- faced Doc to the bleak photography to the plebian sets.
I saw this movie on TV when I was like 13 or 14 years old (the Big Show in the afternoons on ABC New York, I think)...It left a big impression on me as a kid...
I had been meaning to watch this drama for some time, having bought the 'Laurence Olivier Presents' 3-disc set years ago. The subsequent deaths of Olivier, Woodward and then Carrie Fisher put me off for reasons of sadness, I guess, but now, with Coronavirus turning people's thoughts towards entertainment from the archives, this is a compelling watch.
An emotionally remote recovering alcoholic (Burt Lancaster) and his dowdy, unambitious wife (Shirley Booth) face a personal crisis when they take in an attractive lodger.Some have called this the definitive film about alcoholism.
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