First a house talks to us. Then we meet an elderly man. A young woman comes to the house, which is, or was, his. (The exact tense of this is never clear.) He tells her a little about his childhood. Back to her. He and the others are no longer children. She is now falling in love with Farley Granger (in an unbecoming mustache.) Back and forth it goes, with short scenes, like theatrical blackouts. And never do we get to care about the people.<br /><br />It is one stereotype after another. Someone comes into a room, for example. A woman is holding a handkerchief to her eyes. "You've been crying, my dear, " he observes.<br /><br />The only character of interest is the evil Selina, played by Jayne Meadows. Even she, though, is two-dimensional. She is Alexis Carrington in period dress.<br /><br />And speaking of dress, somehow this movie makes the lovely Theresa Wright look homely. I wanted to like her character, named Lark. But I didn't believe her.<br /><br />This comes across as an idea that started to go badly and got more and more out of hand. Then, (it seems, though of course this didn't happen) someone dropped the film and it was hastily reassembled into a vaguely coherent whole.<br /><br />Very few A-pictures of its period are such miserable failures as this movie is. And I have no grudge against it. I'd never heard of it till today. There must be a reason that, despite its starry cast and its beautiful cinematography by Gregg Toland, it is relatively little known. I posit that the reason is it's trite and not even believable.<br /><br />I love fugues. But this is about as far from Bach as ever anything could be.