In Wheeler Auditorium

Admission: $2.50

“And so here the curtains part to reveal the blissful household of Fred MacMurray with perfect wife Joan Bennett (one of the most devastating characters in all cinema: so wretchedly unknowing in her smothering of her husband, so cheerfully oblivious of all the pain around her, the only personage to escape even a tinge of anguish, existing in a dream world of smug politeness; when her husband has to flee to the piazza for a moment of brooding sanity, she calls him back to the bedroom with the admonition, ‘You might catch a cold,' with the solicitude of pure strangulation), a charming Father Knows Best trio of offspring (who vow to revere their father but promptly walk all over him again - watch their faces at the dinner table and try not to quake), and a lucrative toy-manufacturing concession. Enter Barbara Stanwyck. The man who plays with toys grows up but it's too late. At the end Stanwyck leaves alone on a plane to start anew (like Malone in Tarnished Angels). And in both films the unknown is better than the reality we've just witnessed. In no other movie does the claustrophobia of domestic rigidity become so shattering as in this Greek drama of a complacent, insulated man becoming aware.”