[Click on the YouTube link to watch this one...]
A film made available recently in one of the Indicator (UK) box sets that collected a group of Bogart or Bogart-related films from Columbia...here's your chance to watch it without shelling out big bucks for the import set.
Here's a reprint of the relevant portion of Glenn Erickson's review, excerpted from his look at the box set:
The Family Secret
1951 / 1:37 Academy / 85 min. /
Starring: John Derek, Lee J. Cobb, Jody Lawrance, Erin O’Brien-Moore, Santos Ortega, Henry O’Neill, Carl Benton Reid, Peggy Converse, Jean Alexander, Dorothy Tree, Whit Bissell, Raymond Greenleaf, Onslow Stevens, Amanda Blake, Paul Dubov, Percy Helton, Jean Willes.
Cinematography: Burnett Guffey
Art Director: George Brooks
Film Editor: Al Clark
Original Music: George Duning
Written by James Cavanagh, Francis Cockrell, Andrew Solt story Marie Baumer
Executive Producer Humphrey Bogart
Produced by Robert Lord
Directed by Henry Levin
The now fairly obscure The Family Secret is the odd film out in the set and may be the most interesting. It’s one of two Santana productions not starring Bogart; both were directed by Henry Levin. It’s another social conscience movie like Knock on Any Door, only this time John Derek plays the spoiled son of a well-to-do attorney. It’s smoothly written and directed, with some very good acting; Lee J. Cobb is unusually restrained. But it also plays like the template for a thousand ’50s TV dramas about family conflicts.
The weird thing is that the lesson it teaches is all wrong, morally unsound.
Law student and part-time law clerk David Clark (John Derek) flees the scene of a murder. The victim is a friend of the family. David soon admits to his father Howard, an attorney (Lee J. Cobb) that he was the one to kill the young man, but only in self-defense. Mrs. Clark (Erin O’Brien-Moore) wants everyone to pretend nothing happened. But David agrees to go to the D.A. and admit his part in the killing. Howard wants the decision to be David’s decision alone, and says nothing when David lets pass the opportunity to confess. The tension in the family escalates. Howard knows that David is doing wrong, but does nothing. Howard eventually defends another man accused of the crime, a bookie named Joe Elsner (Whit Bissell). David assists in what ought to be viewed as an outrageous breach of ethics.
The somewhat arrogant David has a number of girls calling him for dates, but he gravitates to his secretary Lee Pearson (Jody Lawrance). She holds him to a higher measure of honesty. David wishes he could tell Lee the truth. Will he do the right thing? When it doesn’t look as if Elsner will be acquitted, David begins to crack up.
Can an upscale American household withstand the stress of such fundamental hypocrisy? Slick and self-involved, David doesn’t seem a likely candidate to grow up and face responsibility. The overly familiar conflicts are nicely orchestrated among some excellent actors; we’re willing to believe that John Derek’s acting is improved by the influence of the excellent Jody Lawrance. Bogart may have engaged Erin O’Brien Moore because she played his wife in a ‘social conscience’ film from an earlier era, 1937’s Black Legion.
The story is narrated by the David Clark character, which comes off as a weakness. John Derek is not the man to be given a Walter Neff-style confessional voiceover.
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