Betrayed (1954)

Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Thanks for the memories!

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

Am I getting senile? Is this what Alzheimer feels like? It was hard to follow this movie - and I mean a mere silly little 50s movie at that. For a while there I thought I was losing my mind, or that someone slipped a drug into my drink, or something or other. Scenes seem to be randomly attached for the most part.This old-school cheese also features three leads who all act as if in different genres. Lana Turner thinks she's in a soaper, over-acting her way through this thing with the pathos of one hundred King Kong blonds. She maintains only one facial expression and that's one of a tortured soul, selflessly risking her life for the common good, always with that warm-hearted, worried look: so annoying. Nevermind the fact that her seedy past in no way shape or form fits this kind of behaviour. (We're talking comic-book-like characterization here.) Victor Immature, as childish as ever, lends some much-unneeded lack of seriousness to the proceedings. He must have thought he was filming a broad comedy, grinning like a moron, being as animated as as a pair of breasts in a porn film. Sometimes he was so over-the-top that I half-expected him to impersonate an ape by climbing a telephone poll... Seriously, they should have given him a couple of bananas; that might have helped calm him down a bit, because his thespianism is out of control. Only Clark Gable plays it like it should be played, namely as spy drama requires it.The plot-twist about Victor Immature having become a traitor is okay. What isn't okay is that he became one because they shaved his Mommy's head! That's a bit lame, isn't it?... One would think that double agents and traitors were in it for the money, and occasionally perhaps for idealistic reason, too, but not because their Moms had been turned into skinheads. Besides, we never find out why his mother is suspected of being a Nazi accomplice. Also absurd was having an experienced, competent agent such as Gable hiring a woman who judging by her past couldn't be trusted with keeping a banana away from Victor, let alone a secret.The movie is visually great, but one thing that did bother me regarding appearances is that Gable and Turner had practically the same hair-style! Lana has never looked worse, thanks to the crappy, short-haired, brunette look that some demented producer or insane hair-stylist cooked up here...Someone here complained about the American accents. I disagree. It's the lesser of two evils. Or do some people in all earnestness think that the actors here should have lent even more of a cheese factor to this somewhat hokey movie by sounding laughable, doing unconvincing Dutch accents?

As a war movie,"betrayed" leaves a lot to be desired and Victor Mature as a Dutch is perhaps not the right choice.Actually the film is more a whodunit than a film about the resistant fighters in Netherlands and their relations with their allies in London.The main question is:which of the two suspects,the gorgeous spy with a racy past (Lana turner) or the local hero "the scarf"(Mature) is betraying his/her comrades?Clark Gable becomes some kind of Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot :finally the identity of the traitor makes sense.Another flaw is the weakness of the supporting characters:we would like to know more about the young hero and his grandma,about the Scarf's brother and mother .We do not feel the humiliation of the occupied country except for the short scene when the young resistant is asked by the music teacher to remove the picture of Queen Wilhemine .Like this? try these....."the counterfeit traitor" George Seaton "the two-headed spy" Andre de Toth

"Betrayed", which marked the end of Clark Gable's association with MGM, is not one of his best films. Who knows what went on during the production of this movie, but don't look for the vibrant presence of Clark Gable here. For one thing, he appears to sleep walk throughout the picture. He seems tired and it's obvious he looks much older than what his character is supposed to be.The problem seems to be with the direction of Gottfried Reinhardt. The screen play by Ronald Millar and George Froeschel doesn't help the film either. In spite of the good locations where the movie was shot, the action, at times, seems ridiculous and makes no sense at all. By making Carla Van Oven impersonate someone else, how did the creators think she would get away with it?Lana Turner, who was in her thirties at the time the film was made, was made a brunette, which takes away from her natural blonde beauty. Vitor Mature is the only one that has the liveliest part in the movie as "The Scarf". Some excellent character actors are seen in "Betrayed", among them, Louis Calhern, O.E. Hasse, Wilfrid Hyde-White, Roland Culver, Nora Swinburne, and Ian Carmichael.The film appears to have been "betrayed" by the studio, that obviously didn't have too much hope for its success. As Blanche2 has pointed out in her comment, the stars, Clark Gable and Lana Turner, were the real losers as MGM didn't do anything to help them in making this a better film.

Clark Gable reigned supreme at the studios of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Sadly, this was the last film of his contract and the fact that the studio he had made millions for did not offer to renew it, left him very bitter. He never set foot inside the gates of MGM ever again.