Lightning Strikes Twice (1951)

Film: Lightning Strikes Twice (1951)
Stars: Ruth Roman, Richard Todd, Mercedes McCambridge, Zachary Scott
Director: King Vidor
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2019 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress of Hollywood's Golden Age.  This month, our focus is on Ruth Roman-click here to learn more about Ms. Roman (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We're going to cheat a little bit here in our profile of Ruth Roman's career by going back a few months before the release of last week's Strangers on a Train, but in a lot of ways this feels like a step in a different direction in Roman's career.  At this point, we've profiled three films where Roman had top billing, but she's never actually "been the lead" in any of the movies we've taken a gander at in these pictures.  Frequently Roman's career was marked by forays into westerns or noir, genres that usually have a main female role, but rarely center upon it.  This week, though, Roman actually gets to be the proper main character in our film (even getting to GASP act opposite other women!), and like Strangers, it's helmed by a man who would be cited for Best Director five times in his career.  This week, we come across the little-known Roman picture Lightning Strikes Twice.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film focuses on Shelley Carnes (Roman), a stage actress who is essentially trying to flee from her life.  After a grueling tour of Othello leaves her at death's door, she decides to go out to a dude ranch run by Liza McStringer (McCambridge) & her brother String (Darryl Hickman, in one of his few adult roles, and I believe one of the last roles before he joined a monastery), only to find that it's largely abandoned, as they no longer take on guests.  This is all happening in the shadow of a famed trial where Liza exonerated Richard Trevelyan (Todd), who was accused of murdering his wife (and most people assume he did, in fact, kill her).  The problem is that Trevelyan is living on a nearby ranch, hiding from his surrogate parents (whom he thinks killed his wife), and of course as he's the male lead, Shelley is going to fall for him.

The movie's second half is some batshit crazy melodrama, enough to make this worth checking out if you're a lover of the Douglas Sirk-style of filmmaking.  It turns out, of course, that Richard wasn't the killer (how else will he end up with Shelley in the end of the picture?), and it's not Scott's Harvey, who is a louse (which Zachary Scott characters aren't louses...see also our recent Roman picture Colt 45?), though there is a truly bizarre scene after Shelley turns down his marriage proposal where we're very much supposed to believe he's about to rape Shelley, even though all he's doing is reuniting her with Richard...if I missed something here, I'd love for you to tell me as I didn't understand what the hell was going on during that scene.  Either way, though, it turns out that mousy Liza was the one who killed Richard's wife when she found out she was having an affair with pretty much every other male character save her brother (and not for a lack of trying on his part), and has every intention of killing Shelley too, but doesn't, because she (and her brother) both go down in flames in a car chase just while Shelley & Richard, now exonerated, skate away to a happy life together.

The film's best element is its camp value.  McCambridge, one of the best supporting players of the era, brings it up to the rafters as Liza during those final scenes, chewing scenery as much as possible (I haven't seen it, but I've heard this is one of the more appealing aspects of putting her opposite another scene-stealer, Joan Crawford, in Johnny Guitar).  However, Roman doesn't really get much of the camp.  She's fun in this part-there's an amiability to her onscreen presence that's likable, but she doesn't really know how to land the movie against actors who understood the material better like McCambridge and Richard Todd (just two years after his Oscar-nominated work in The Hasty Heart, his career was already on the bit of the skids, and would need to go to Disney to play Robin Hood to continue keeping his name in lights).  Roman, as a result, shows that even with a central role in an interesting if not particularly strong picture, that she doesn't know how to elevate when she's made captain of the ship, instead being better as a supporting player.  Next week we'll conclude our look at Roman's career with a film from much later in her time as a leading woman, but in the meantime, share your thoughts on Roman so far in the comments, and if there's a crucial part of hers I've been missing in this series that might ignite more love for the actress.