Just one moment in the movie has always made me vomit. SPOILER - when Stanwyck tells MacMurray, after shooting him, that all of a sudden she couldn't pull the trigger again. I always hated that moment. Stanwyck is completely cold-blooded and the idea that she'd suddenly care for MacMurray is laughable.
I'm not sure we're meant to take her words at face value. At least, there is a certain ambiguity here. She doesn't shoot, and we don't know why for sure, and she gives a reason, but we don't have to accept her reason. Maybe she doesn't even know why she didn't take the second shot, and so just reaches for the first idea that comes to her. MacMurray doesn't believe her anyway.I think that the point of the scene is that in the noirworld, a declaration of love isn't going to save you. I like the way the scene shows how ruthless MacMurray has become. And, of course, we get to enjoy the irony of the lovers killing each other.Do you clean up after yourself, or do you just let your vomit mellow?
Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) 9.5/10SPOILERS This story is pure fiction. I don't believe anyone could be that obsessed with someone who hasn't even known or acknowledged her. And then, there's no explanation for why, once Stefan leaves for Milano for "2 weeks," they don't meet again (at least not for a long while). And her explanation for not looking him up once she had his child - cuz she wanted to be the only woman who never asked him for anything - is terribly silly.
I think it is meant to be real cuz there's no other explanation of why she doesn't take that second shot.
There are other explanations, only the film does not supply them. Imagination is required.Here's one idea: the Stanwyck character has a death wish. She is tired of life. She thought killing her husband would give her greater freedom. She thought taking up with MacMurray would help solve her problems and add spice to her life. It hasn't worked out that way. And after she delivers her final ultimatum to MacMurray at Jerry's market, she realizes she's alienated him and that he will have to come after her. She's lost him, and she wonders if she's ever really had him. Maybe he's just been playing her all along. Maybe he's just the male version of herself. So she gets the gun ready. MacMurray comes, and she's right, he's come to kill her. But she fires first. It's instinctive, the need to survive. She doesn't make a clean job of it; she needs to fire again. If she fires again she will kill him and then she will live. But then what? She will have to explain things to the authorities; she won't get the money; she won't have the man. She will have to start all over, with another scheme, with another man. But she's no longer young. Things are getting harder. And all the planning, the maneuvering...it can make one tired. So very tired. Maybe it would be better to give up and let MacMurray shoot her. Then she wouldn't have to worry about anything ever again. If only there were more time to think things over."So long, baby."
The problem is that the film is an adaptation, and to make the story acceptable to audiences of the day, the nature of the central character's sexual proclivity had to be falsified. Lisa’s essential masochism is explicit in the Stefan Zweig story from which the movie derives. There the character writes: “I grieved, and I wanted to; I wallowed in every deprivation I inflicted on myself while I thought about you." And: "Mourning was my joy; I renounced society and every pleasure, and was intoxicated with delight at the mortification I thus superadded to the lack of seeing you."There's no way audiences would have accepted such a kinked-out freak as a heroine in 1948, so Ophuls changed her into a noble figure carrying a torch for LOVE. But anyone--especially any woman--watching the film in 2013 has got to call Bravo Sierra on the proceedings (try showing the film to the women in your life--it will enrage them). Perhaps now is the time for someone (Cronenberg, say) to remake the film and at last do justice to Zweig's conception.
I don't think she thought taking up with MacMurray would change anything. I think she was going with Nino Zarcotti all along, and planned the whole shtick with MacMurray just cuz he was an insurance man and she wanted to get the insurance dough. Her plan was probably to take the money, and live happily ever after with her boy toy Nino. I do believe that when she says that suddenly now she has the feelings for MacMurray, it's meant seriously, and I just don't think it works on any level.
btw, one thing I noticed that perhaps you could say is a mistake in the movie: on that final fateful night, just before MacMurray comes to the house, you see Stanwyck preparing the place, putting the gun under the cushion - if I recall correctly, that is the only moment in the movie that MacMurray would not have been there to see. the whole story is from MacMurray's perspective - everything we see, is something that MacMurray is telling us, because he has seen. Then you have just that one single moment where we see something that he couldn't have seen, cuz he wasn't in the house yet. Of course, after she shoots him, he figures out that she hid the gun under the cushion, but IMO, if we are seeing the entire movie only through MacMurray's eyes, it's a mistake to have that one moment where we see something he could not have seen. They should have just shown her pulling the gun without showing beforehand how she hid it before MacMurray showed up at the house. They could have kept the narration, where MacMurray says ("My plan was to.... but of course, she had other plans...) without actually showing her actions in the house before he shows up.
Not the way I see it at all. I think there's a level of ambiguity operating that makes radically divergent interpretations possible. It's one of the things I like about the film: "The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked; who can know it?"
Slavish observance of a narrative conceit does not always produce good results. Even in Rear Window AH doesn't always stick to the idea of seeing everything from Jimmy Stewart's apartment window (during the dead-dog-in-the-courtyard scene, for example, we see some of the neighbors from perspectives that Stewart can't possibly have). There should be consistency in such approaches, but it doesn't have to be adhered to 100% of the time--especially if, by breaking the conceit, one can enhance the drama or add necessary info. In DI, I believe Wilder was correct to not always follow his self-imposed convention: seeing Stanwyck preparing for MacMurray's visit helps generate suspense; and to quote the Master again, suspense is always preferable to surprise.
when do you think she started taking up with Nino Zachetti (which I see now is the correct way to spell his last name)? You think she was with him all along, or started messing around with him at some point while she was seeing MacMurray? If the former, then do you think Zachetti was only going with her daughter as some kind of coverup, that it was all part of Stanwyck's plan? Or was it only after the daughter was going with him for a while (and after MacMurray came into the picture) that Stanwyck started going with Zachetti?