Valerie (1957)

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

Perfect cast and a good story

Brilliant and touching

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

"Valerie" is a movie that only gets better the more you watch of the film. Up until the last 15 minutes or so, I wasn't that impressed with the story (or Miss Ekberg's acting) but it all got very exciting towars teh end...making it well worth seeing.The story begins with a mass murder. John Garth (Sterling Hayden) leaves a home after a shooting which left three people dead and his wife shot and close to death. The film shows both his account and hers of the events leading up to the shooting...a shooting he claims was in self defense. What really happened?In some ways, this story is like the classic Japanese film "Rashomon", though instead of three viewpoints you have two...and teasing apart what REALLY happened is a bit easier in "Valerie". It's a simpler story...but still well done. As I mentioned above, my only quibble was some of Ekberg's acting....it often wasn't great and her accent was a bit thick, so, if possible, watch with captions.

Like in "the iron sheriff" ,which also features Hayden as the lead,the movie begins when many important events happened .In this whodunit disguised as western, the hero wanted to piece together the past ,meeting several suspects ,during his son' s trial .We watched the story through different eyes .The same goes for "Valerie" which is nothing but a long flashback;whereas the scenes are told by the hero or his lawyer or by the showdown's victim,the story takes an entirely new meaning .The main inspiration is not the traditional western,but rather Japanese Kurosawa's "Rashomon"(1950) -which was remade by Martin Ritt as ""the outrage" (1964) The story sustains interest throughout ,except for the final scenes which are botched.Anita Ekberg possesses enough ambiguity to pass for an angel or a demon.Sterling Hayden is ,as usual,an imposing individual,even in the scenes of his trial when he is supposed to keep a low profile.

Respected rancher and Civil War veteran John Garth (Sterling Hayden) goes on trial for killing his in-laws and wounding his wife Valerie (Anita Ekberg) but flashbacks from the witness stand give conflicting accounts of what happened...Gerd Oswald's moody RASHOMON-like western doesn't explore the nature of truth the way Kurosawa's film does (in this case, someone's lying and someone isn't) but it's interesting to see how the same words and deeds can be used to bolster both the prosecution and the defense. In Garth's version, he's a long-suffering cuckold whose immigrant wife is a greedy slut with a yen for anything in pants while her testimony paints the war-hardened vet (who's job was getting information from enemy prisoners) as a sadistic psycho who's sole pleasure is making her life pure hell. There's also testimony from the town's Reverend (Ekberg's real-life husband, Anthony Steel) who's accused of being Valerie's latest paramour but in a rousing finale the real story comes out -and not a moment too soon, otherwise the townsfolk would have believed the wrong party. The film's been called a "noir western" but that has more to do with the adult themes than any Expressionistic, shadowy photography which would have been difficult in any event due to the sparse use of night scenes. The German émigré director painted it black in other ways and pushed the Production Code envelope by making it clear in Valerie's testimony that Garth raped his bartered bride on their wedding night, beat and belittled her for being a foreigner, accused her of adultery with both his brother and the Reverend, attempted to abort their unborn child, and tortured her with lit cigars. Whew. Prematurely weathered Sterling Hayden's dour demeanor doesn't give away the denouement (although his account does seem stilted) and as the titular enigma, Anita Ekberg looks gorgeous in period costumes but her overdone make-up makes the shapely Swedish somnambulist look like a modern day glamor girl, something the filmmakers no doubt intended as a come-on to entice audiences. That said, it's compelling trash with an ample amount of mayhem and well worth tracking down. Oswald & Ekberg reunited the following year for Columbia's SCREAMING MIMI, a lurid, gritty little B-noir psycho-thriller that predicted the Italian giallo cycle of the 1960s.

This is an interesting western about a husband (Sterling Hayden) who shoots his wife (Anita Ekberg) and her parents. The story is told in flashback from both husband and wife, each story contradicting the other. It gives a chance for Anita to act, a chance she did not have in most of her films, where what counted was her physical presence. She is at her best when she uses her power of seduction with Hayden's brother. Hayden is very good as John Garth, a man who fought in the war for the Union, where his job was to get confessions from prisoners. Even Anthony Steel, who was married to Anita in real life and never was much of an actor is good here as the Rev. Blake who leaves us in doubt if he is having an affair with Anita or not.