A Double Life (1947)

A Double Life is an American thriller film first released in 1947, directed by George Cukor.  The film is based on a play by William Shakespeare and stars Ronald Colman, Signe Hasso, Edmond O’Brien, Shelley Winters and Ray Collins.  Our overall rating for this film is: excellent.


Anthony John is a renowned stage actor who, against his better judgement, allows himself to be coaxed into playing the lead role in Shakespeare’s Othello.  The part of the jealous husband who ultimately murders his beloved wife turns out to be appropriate for John, for he has a jealous streak and still claims ownership of his ex-wife Brita.  Gradually, whilst playing the role to great acclaim, John becomes taken over by the character of Othello and soon finds it difficult to distinguish reality from the workings of his strained imagination.  In his mind, Brita is still his wife, the wife he passionately adores.  His publicity agent Bill is a scheming villain who intends to rob him of his wife.  Then he meets Pat Kroll, a waitress in an Italian restaurant, and finds her strangely alluring.  One night, whilst visiting Pat at her lodgings, John is overtaken by his stage persona and becomes a psychotic killer...

Classic film noir and Shakespearian tragedy are handsomely interlaced in this gripping psychological drama, George Cukor’s darkest and most compelling exploration of the human psyche.  A riveting central performance from Ronald Colman, in the role that won him his only Oscar, makes A Double Life one of cinema’s most harrowing and revealing incursions into the fraught existence of the professional actor.  The noir stylisation (in particular Milton Krasner’s moody high contrast cinematography) is entirely appropriate for a film about a man who is struggling to hold together his fractured identity as his striving for perfection in his art takes him to the brink of reason and beyond, into the abyss of mental derangement.

Those who most associate the name George Cukor with light-hearted comedies such as Adam’s Rib (1949) and lavish musicals like My Fair Lady (1964) will be surprised by A Double Life, a film that languishes in the bleak, comfortless hinterland of the darkest films noirs.  With a murder sequence that gives the famous shower scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) a good run for its money in its sheer visceral nastiness and heightened sense of terror, this is a film that pulls few punches and convinces us that the same human being is capable of harbouring two quite distinct natures, one a gentle sophisticate, the other a vicious savage that is incapable of containing its baser impulses.  It is not much of an exaggeration to say that A Double Life is one of the most disturbing films ever to come out of Hollywood.  It is certainly one of cinema’s most convincing portrayals of insanity.  

Ronald Colman is not an actor who is renowned for playing monsters.  With his clipped accent, benign personality and noble bearing he would appear to be the epitome of the English officer class.  So to see him undergo a Jekyll and Hyde transformation in this film, to see him not merely playing Othello but actually becoming the ill-fated Moor, being totally consumed by the part to the extent that he is virtually unrecognisable, is indeed the stuff of nightmares - one of the few genuinely shocking moments that cinema has given us.  Just as memorable as the scene in which Coleman brutally dispatches a ravishing Shelley Winters (in the role that established her as a major Hollywood film actress) are the utterly chilling staged sequences from the last act of Shakespeare’s Othello.  By replaying the same scene (Desdemona’s murder) from different angles, Cukor shows us the protagonist’s diabolical transformation from two perspectives - internally, as it is experienced by the actor, and externally, as it is seen by his ex-wife - and the effect is truly terrifying.

As the tension builds to a memorably grim climax, in which the outcome is all too predictable yet nonetheless traumatic to watch, the audience cannot escape being both appalled and moved by the mental disintegration of an actor who must live his part in order to fill the void that is his own barren identity.  The Faustian connection is easily made - every time an actor takes on a role, he is entering into an agreement with the Devil, risking his soul so that he may for a time live the life of another.  What perhaps makes A Double Life so shocking, so unforgettable, is that it leaves us with a sense of how malleable the human psyche really is, and how easy it is to unlock the cage that contains the savage that is our other self - the monster we most dread.

© James Travers 2011

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