Talk About a Stranger (1952)

Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

Totally miserable film dealing with a young boy's suspicion when his dog is found poisoned. The next door neighbor, a disagreeable, nasty and mysterious man is thought to be the killer and the boy goes out of control whenever he sees the man.Nancy Davis, Mrs. Ronald Reagan, played his mother. Her character is outrageously benign here. Even the way she calls out to her son in the film, a mother would be so much more assertive here. As the father, George Murphy is given a poor script to work with. Owner of a fruit orchard, a sidebar theme in this dismal film regards the dropping of temperatures and its affects upon what is being grown.Our mysterious neighbor's transition is sudden and while he becomes a sympathetic figure in the end, it's too much to digest and believe.

I found this film to be quite boring and the plot just plain silly. Once the boy finds his dog dead, with the expertise of a vet, he exclaims, "My dog has been poisoned!, and it was Dr. Mahler!" Even more ridiculous, his father responds, " I wouldn't put it past him!" Then they go to the mysterious Dr.'s house to confront him, only to hear his denial and leave. Definitely a kids movie to teach the morals of not "judging a book by it's cover". But if anyone thinks this is even mildly creepy, you would never survive the Boston subway system. No wonder why the director did not direct any major film for over 8 years after this piece of silliness. Some good camera work, but it still feels like a Leaver it to Beaver episode. Watch it at your own risk.

This movie is creepy. To a small degree it's creepy in the way it intends: It does seem as if Harper Lee may have seen this before writing her lovely "To Kill A Mockingbird," also about children (here just one child) wrongly suspicious of an odd neighbor.In that novel, and the movie made of it, the children are very likable. Billy Grey is not, though possibly he was at the time. Maybe if I ha been a little boy seeing this at the time I would have identified.The fact is, though, the boy at the center of this is very troubled, constantly near the brink of hysterics. When he is acting like a boy, he is shooting a toy gun or making gun sounds. In a time capsule, this aspect would be interesting indeed but today it is distasteful.The original may well have had to do with the boy's worries about his mother's pregnancy. Would a new little girl (the whole thing seems very misogynistic) or little boy take away all her attention? Something, for sure, has made his kid a bundle of nerves.Nancy Davis has a thankfully small role and so does George Murphy. Kurt Kazsner as the eponymous stranger is good, as are the supporting players.The fifties gave us some fine music and art but a little item like this serves to remind, or show someone unfamiliar with that decade, what an unpleasant time it was, also.

An old dark house in a California orange-growing community gains a mysterious tenant, and, scared on Halloween, the kids take an instant dislike to him. When the mutt belonging to one of them, Bud (Billy Gray), is later found poisoned, Bud fixes on the strange neighbor as its killer. With a November freeze threatening the crop, already restive townsfolk start to gossip, egged on by the implacable Bud. His parents, George Murphy and Nancy (Reagan) Davis -- both actors to become major forces in California and national politics in the next decade -- find him careening out of control. The story starts out as a fairly routine thriller based on a courageous (for its time) caution against McCarthyist hysteria. But then it turns into something more complex and memorable. When Bud sets off to find incriminating evidence, the tone and the images grow more gothic and evocative. John Alton's superb cinematography conjures up masterful effects from the smoke rising from the smudge-pots, the twisted branches and dark foliage, and the beclouded moonlight. (There's much in this movie that steals the thunder from Charles Laughton's solo masterpiece, the 1955 Night of the Hunter). The script deserves credit, too, for resolutely retaining the young adolescent's point of view while never stooping to condescend.