1946’s The Man I Love crams a lot of movie and too many characters in only 97 minutes.  It combines film noir, musical, various domestic dramas and a PTSD storyline, each given such brief coverage as to undermine the effectiveness of the others.  I was only surprised nobody worked in western and science fiction and I assume that’s only because nobody thought to do so.

Perhaps the easiest way to sum up the plot, and the general sensation of overload, is to briefly cover the main characters.  Ida Lupino stars as a nightclub singer who goes to the west coast to spend Christmas with sisters Andrea King and Martha Vickers, as well as brother Warren Douglas.  Those siblings all live together with King while her husband (John Ridgely) is under psychiatric care at the veteran’s hospital.  Across the hallway in another apartment are husband and wife Don McGuire and Dolores Maran, the new parents of twins.  Maran has been stepping out on her husband, but objects to any attention given to him, such as when he is advised by King to go a hospital to have a burn on his wrist treated.  Then there’s the nightclub owner played by Robert Alda, who has designs on King, and then on Maran, while also hitting hard on Lupino.  Then there’s the son of King and Ridgely, who has a black eye from fighting with the other boys, who had been saying his dad was in the nuthouse and…good God, you had to get the impression by now how much of a mess this is.

And we’re not even into what I suspect is the core story amongst all these threads, that being the mysterious stranger she bails out of jail after Douglas dodges some time in stir by shifting the blame to an innocent man.  She will eventually realize this man, Bruce Bennett, is a famous concert pianist who has been long missing after separating from his wife.  Since then, he has been a merchant marine.  Almost as soon as a romance develops between Bennett and Lupino, that ex returns and threatens to come between them and…blah blah blah.

A fatal flaw of this film is the sheer number of characters, and many of them are forgotten about until the threads involving them are revisited in a rushed conclusion.  It is almost like an early version of Robert Altman’s Short Cuts, only with a significantly shorter runtime.  That this film has been cited by Scorsese as one of the chief inspirations for his costly misfire New York, New York is one more thing I’m going to blame this movie for.

But the worst aspect of this picture is how completely unbelievable I found every second of its runtime.  I did not believe any one of the great many characters, nor anything they did or said.  Given this, the quality of those individual performances becomes moot.

And for a work with so many characters and situations packed into an hour and a half, one would think the dialogue in The Man I Love would be more streamlined.  Instead, we have Lupino relating an especially famous Oscar Wilde quote to Bennett with a long lead-in about “I remember once reading something while on a train to Duluth…”.  This may be a movie about how all of us are in the gutter, but it appears some of us were looking at Duluth instead of the stars.

Dir: Raoul Walsh

Starring Ida Lupino, Robert Alda, Andrea King, Martha Vickers, and way too many others

Watched on Warner Archive blu-ray