Home Before Dark. The best asset of Home Before Dark (1. Eileen and Robert Bassing from an eponymous novel by the woman on the team. Jean Simmons plays Charlotte Bronn, a professor's wife who has been hospitalized for a year after undergoing a nervous breakdown. Returning home, she learns that her husband Arnold has gotten along fine during her absence, thanks in part to support from her stepsister, Joan Carlisle, who lives in the same house. ITunes is the world's easiest way to organize and add to your digital media collection. We are unable to find iTunes on your computer. To download and subscribe to Home Before Dark by Tim Herb and Kevin Bradley: Gaming, Movie, Tech, Music, and Eating.
Joan has always enjoyed hanging out with her scholarly brother- in- law; indeed, suspicion that Arnold and Joan might be having an affair was one of the things that brought about Charlotte's mental crisis. The husband and stepsister remained as chummy as ever while Charlotte was away, and as soon as she's back home they reawaken her fears by discouraging her from joining fully in the household's activities. Also present is Jake Diamond, a young man who's renting a room in the house and teaching at the local university, where he hopes to become a professor with Arnold's help. He needs whatever assistance he can get, because he's Jewish, and the university is reluctant to hire Jews because it's afraid an . Arnold says he's backing Jake because he opposes anti- Semitism, but his support gets wobbly when he realizes it might cost him a long- awaited promotion. Recognizing each other as fellow outsiders, Jake and Charlotte become friends. Charlotte increasingly distrusts everyone else, though - especially Arnold and Joan, who keep pushing her into the background whenever possible. Friends add to her mistrust by dropping inadvertent hints about the close relationship between those two, and when Charlotte starts suspecting that her food is being doped or poisoned, we realize that they could be gaslighting her, hoping she'll be institutionalized again so they can pair off permanently. Sure enough, it isn't long before her mind begins to slip into paranoid patterns again. Listen free to Neil Diamond – Home Before Dark (If I Don't See You Again, Pretty Amazing Grace and more). Discover more music, concerts, videos, and pictures with the largest catalogue online at Last.fm. Home Before Dark primes us to sympathize with Charlotte from the outset. Yet the picture is artfully ambiguous about what's really going on, keeping us tantalizingly off balance as to whether Charlotte is the victim of an awful scheme or is falling back into old delusions. A harrowing climax reveals the full extent of her psychological travails, including multiple shock treatments in the hospital, of which she has no memory; and the ending is more quietly hopeful than openly optimistic. Enemies or no enemies, it's clear that Charlotte's sanity is hanging by a slender thread at best. Viewers rooting for her can't take any comfort from the fact that her name is Charlotte Bronn, recalling the 1. English novelist Charlotte Bront. Simmons also makes brilliant use of the movie's most important prop: a lavish evening gown that's way too large for her, making her look a bit like the Statue of Liberty during the climactic scene. Rhonda Fleming gives Joan the right degree of offhand cheeriness, and looks a lot better in that gown, which is just her size. Dan O'Herlihy is convincingly aloof as Arnold, and Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. Steve Dunne makes a solid impression as a family friend who fends off loneliness with alcohol. The weaker elements of Home Before Dark come from director Mervyn Le. Roy and cinematographer Joseph F. Biroc, who employ a generally bland style that prevents the story from fulfilling all of its promise. To his credit, Le. Roy creates effective deep- focus compositions at important moments in the plot, and makes interesting use of statuary to punctuate settings that might otherwise seem ordinary. The lighting is plain and dull, though - layers of noir- style duskiness would have boosted the atmospherics a great deal - and there's little visual nuance apart from an effectively weird shadow on Charlotte's face near the beginning. Biroc was fresh from a couple of Samuel Fuller assignments, so I would have expected him to capitalize on the story's offbeat possibilities; and Le. Roy had made The Bad Seed (1. Patty Mc. Cormack two years earlier, giving him recent experience in exploring a demented household. But neither of them quite rose to this picture's challenge. Reflecting on Home Before Dark in his autobiography, Mervyn Le. Roy: Take One, the main things Le. Roy commented on were extremes of temperature. On the steamy end of the spectrum, the lights were so hot during a shoot in the Crystal Room at the Beverly Hills Hotel that the sprinkler system went off, drenching the cast and crew. Cold weather also caused a problem. Most of the picture was filmed in and near the Massachusetts town of Marblehead in wintertime - the frigid ambience is crucial to the story's downbeat emotional tone - and it got so cold one night that the cameras froze. Even worse, Fleming's tongue froze, rendering her unable to speak. Leroy tried and failed to do the same. It's hard to tell whether the reason was compassion or cowardice, but if Le. Roy had investigated the story's subject more deeply he might have brought more atmosphere to a movie that doesn't quite live up to its highly dramatic subject. Director: Mervyn Le. Roy. Producer: Mervyn Le. Roy. Screenplay: Eileen and Robert Bassing; based on the novel by Eileen Bassing. Cinematographer: Joseph F. Biroc. Film Editing: Philip W. Anderson. Art Direction: John Beckman. Music: Ray Heindorf. With: Jean Simmons (Charlotte Bronn), Dan O'Herlihy (Arnold Bronn), Rhonda Fleming (Joan Carlisle), Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. Hathaway)BW- 1. 36m. David Sterritt. VIEW TCMDb ENTRY. Home Before Dark - Neil Diamond . It follows the fine but ill- fated 1. Songs, which was sabotaged by Sony's . Songs had to be recalled from store shelves just as Diamond received better reviews than he had in a decade. Sony reissued it in 2. Diamond, disappointed but undaunted, sought out Rubin. Rubin enlisted Heartbreakers keyboardist Benmont Tench and lead guitarist Mike Campbell, studio guitarist/bassist Smokey Hormel, and former Chavez guitar slinger Matt Sweeney. David Campbell did some skeletal string arrangements, but that's it. In addition, Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks duets on the track . He's out there, bashing on his guitar and singing from a position of extreme vulnerability; he's on a wire without a net. His musicians understand what is so dynamically and poetically evident in the songs, and use painterly care in adorning them. Diamond is not a young man anymore and, thankfully, he doesn't write like one - - though he sounds lean and hungry for something just out of reach. Its lyric reflects the travails of a protagonist whose heart bears hurt without the grace and wisdom that age is supposed to bring. The grain in his voice is fierce; it quavers just a bit in the refrain, and Sweeney's electric guitar nails it to the wall. His character converses with a reflection, a ghost. The gorgeously crafted instrumental bridge and the sense of loneliness in the protagonist's voice combine seamlessly. The album's first single is . His infectious, haunting melody is jarring, played in minor chords by fingerpicked steel- string guitars and anchored by a standup bass. Tench's piano adds tension just before the refrain where the guitars get punchy flamenco- style and break it wide open. Strings decorate the backdrop, as the lyric juxtaposes the present against the past, not as contrast but as progression. The duet with Maines, . It's a joint confession between lovers who are lost to one another; the tragedy is they have no idea how they grew apart. Tench's piano improv fills the space between verses; he underscores the melancholy gorgeously. Home Before Dark is a less . It is a stark and moving portrait of what an accepted artist found when he reached all the way down to face his fear, doubt, and knowledge, and brought the discovery into his work. Diamond proves not only that can he still write great songs, but also that he can deliver them with toughness and grit as an expression of real beauty.
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