THE NAKED EDGE: caution - spoiler alert!

Stick around until the very end of the closing credits to THE NAKED EDGE and, as the screen fades to black, a disembodied voice will implore you not to reveal the secret of who killed Jason Roote to anyone else.

Well - spoiler alert - I'm going to do just that. There's no other way to provide a full and honest review of this 1961 thriller.

Gary Cooper's final film is a huge disappointment – and not just because there's no nudity or edginess.

THE NAKED EDGE depends entirely upon a false premise to sustain the tension, and the frustration I felt at the final denouement simply compounded the frustration that had already built up over the course of the story.

Cooper plays George Radcliffe, an American businessman living in London who comes into a large amount of money at the same time as a work colleague is found guilty - largely on Radcliffe's testimony - of murdering their boss, Jason Roote, and stealing 60 thousand pounds.

Radcliffe uses his windfall to go into business with a slightly shady Michael Wilding, and five years later he's living in an enormous mansion and being chauffeured to work in a Rolls Royce.

Life is tickety-boo, as the English liked to say in 1961, until a letter - delayed in the mail for five years - arrives accusing Radcliffe of Roote's murder and demanding half of the money he stole.  It's opened by Mrs Radcliffe (Deborah Kerr) who's immediately overwhelmed with doubts and suspicions which her husband does nothing to dispel by acting in an incredibly shifty manner.

There's faint - very faint - traces of Cary Grant's character, Johnny Aysgarth, in 'Suspicion' in Cooper's portrayal of Radcliffe, and a strong sense of director Michael Anderson attempting to evoke that earlier Hitchcock film, but really all the two share in common is a rotten ending.

Cooper's forced to drag out the ambiguity way beyond what's plausible, repeatedly deflecting his wife's increasingly distraught questions with increasingly ridiculous evasions. Why - when he's innocent - does he try so damn hard to look like a guilty man?

Everything he does and says is intended to fuel his wife's suspicions and push her to turn him into the police. Presumably if she did he'd be able to cop an insanity plea on the basis of his performance here.

Cooper tries his best with the material he's got to work with, and given that he was suffering from cancer and would die before the film was released, he acquits himself well but it is a thankless role and surely not the swansong he would have hoped for.

If you're willing to not simply suspend your disbelief but also hang, draw and quarter it as you're jerked around by a deliberately deceitful and heavy handed plot, and are happy to be deafened by a ridiculously melodramatic musical score, THE NAKED EDGE is the film for you. For everyone else there's 'High Noon' and the chance to witness Coop at his Oscar winning best.

AN IDEAL HUSBAND: I'm not Wilde about this

Oscar Wilde was a brilliant playwright with a biting wit and a brilliant way with words, but you wouldn't know that if all you had to go on was this 1947 British version of his 1895 stage play AN IDEAL HUSBAND.
For much of the running time the cast are swamped by the garish Technicolor and drowned out by the insistent classical muzak score, but that's not an entirely bad thing because in the moments when it's quiet enough to hear them speak it's obvious that none of them are up to the task of delivering Wilde's words in an amusing or convincing way.
Imported American star Paulette Goddard is well out of her depth as the seductive and scheming Mrs Cheveley, and Hugh Williams as the target of her machinations is so dull that it's impossible to evoke any sympathy for his plight. Diana Wynyard just looks bored with the whole affair while Michael Wilding should have sued cameraman Georges Perinal for shooting him exclusively from angles so bad that he reduces the dashing matinee idol to a collection of sharp angles clinging to an enormous nose.
Perhaps director Alexander Korda was so distracted by his efforts to cram as many different bright colours as possible into every frame of film that he didn't notice the dismal performances being delivered by his cast. Not even the venerable Sir C Aubrey Smith in his penultimate role can save this flop.
Utterly undistinguished on every level, my advice is to give this film a very wide berth and watch the 1999 version with Rupert Everett and Julianne Moore instead.