Lightning Strikes Twice
Tags: murder

Plot synopsis:
Once a rancher, Richard Trevelyan (Richard Todd) is now on a Texas prison's death row. But he wins a new trial, then a complete acquittal when a lone juror holds out.
Actress Shelley Carnes (Ruth Roman) is on her way to a Texas dude ranch for a rest. Along the way, she meets ranchers J.D. (Frank Conroy) and Myra Nolan (Kathryn Givney) and ends up borrowing their car. Lost in a storm, she encounters Trevelyan by chance. It turns out he knows J.D. and Myra.
The dude ranch is closed when Shelley gets there. Liza McStringer (Mercedes McCambridge), who runs it with a younger brother nicknamed String (Darryl Hickman), explains that she was the juror who let Trevelyan go free. And now she's being shunned by neighbors and friends.
Shelley bonds with the troubled String, so she is invited to stay a while. She learns that Loraine, the late wife of Trevelyan and murder victim, was a rather wicked woman, loathed by many. There is reason to believe Loraine once had an affair with J.D.
Returning the car, Shelley spends a night with the Nolans and is introduced to Harvey Turner (Zachary Scott), a neighbor who is immediately attracted to her. Harvey, too, speaks ill of the late Loraine and describes himself as lucky to have escaped her clutches.
Shelley again meets Trevelyan and the two cannot resist each other. A jealous and spiteful Liza turns out to be the one who murdered Loraine, and now she nearly does likewise to Shelley before a last-minute rescue. Liza and String flee in their car, but don't get very far.

Review: McCambridge, Roman stand out in King Vidor's overloaded desert melodrama.
Richard Todd sits on death row, waiting execution for his wife's murder.
At the eleventh hour, a reprieve and new trial come through; he's acquitted, thanks to one holdout juror (Mercedes McCambridge).
Enter Ruth Roman, a touring actress in search of the desert's restorative climate.
En route (in a scene prescient of Janet Leigh's flight from Phoenix in Psycho), she gets lost in thunderstorms and takes refuge in an abandoned house -- where Todd is holed up.
Run by McCambridge and her emotionally disturbed young brother (Darryl Hickman), it has closed down, but they agree to put Roman up for a few days.
Director King Vidor and scriptwriter Lenore Coffee, having goaded Bette Davis to pull out all the stops in Beyond The Forest two years earlier, here take on another overloaded melodrama, with mixed results.
But the movie's biggest stumble lies in the casting of Richard Todd.
Remembered if at all as the title character in that echt-1950s biopic of pious patriotism A Man Called Peter, here his stiff British accent and acting falsify the whole Southwestern milieu (Lightning Strikes Twice, like Desert Fury of five years earlier, evokes the new Sunbelt of money and leisure).
Ruth Roman, on evidence of this movie and Tomorrow Is Another Day, had more range and subtlety than she was let display in her best known role as Farley Granger's mannikin-like fiancee in Strangers on a Train.
Ruth Roman is a big city actress looking for a bit of rest in the wilderness and finding little.
Next thing you know she's neck deep in contretemps with suspected murderers and intrigue!
The movie is a routine Warners programmer but given some snap by the quality performances of Ruth Roman, subtle and dignified, and Mercedes McCambridge, controlled for most of the film but she gets her chance to do some florid emoting later in the picture.
Another crazed logic-free over-acted melodrama in the same late Forties/early Fifties hothouse mode of Warners' Beyond The Forest, The Damned Don't Cry and This Woman Is Dangerous, this time sans the stellar fuel tank of Bette Davis or Joan Crawford.
. .stormy weather indeed.No need to rehash plot revealed by earlier posters, a Texas-set dramatic chile con carne liberally laced with murder, unrequited love and dark secrets set in one of those those only-in-the-movies remote desert communities where people live miles apart in remote rancheros.
. .but still show up in gowns and white dinner jackets at swank poolside barbecues that would put Manhattanites to shame.Although the smoldering-yet-vanilla Richard Todd, underused Ruth Roman and Zachery Scott(in a "hey-it's-a-paycheck" role that comes out of nowhere and getsthere fast) are ostensible stars, show is stolen by cactus-chomping Mercedes McCambridge in (apparently unintentional) schizophrenic role as a butch desert denizen (think of her role in Johnny Guitar, only less feminine) who not only has inexplicable crush on charmless Todd after he has allegedly killed his wife.
Things go off-cliff (as does at least one vehicle) from there.Whatever film lacks in reality, it more than makes up for in implausibility and psychological chaos that would baffle Freud.
Immediately following his "Beyond the Forest" and "The Fountainhead" (also Warners), this Vidor film is somewhat less feverish and over-the-top than those two, and accordingly does not pack the same punch, but still has a nice erotic frisson.
Mercedes McCambridge does some of the same kind of scenery chewing that Davis did in "Forest," while Zachary Scott reprises his charming scoundrel from many Warner's films..
All the correct elements for a romantic murder mystery suspense.
A dark mysterious man who looks tortured by his problems and associations, a lively woman who is willing to try and believe a man who might be a murderer until the temptation of her imagination overcomes her, an unknown factor of the other woman who is extremely jealous and doesn't want anyone else to have the man she has always wanted, a emotionally disturbed brother who is a reactionary to events in life, and finally a secret that you are not sure you believe any more than the heroine.
After getting an Oscar nomination for The Hasty Heart, British actor Richard Todd did a few more American films before returning to the United Kingdom.
Some like A Man Called Peter were top rate and some like Lightning Strikes Twice fall right apart at the beginning.
There is no way that Mercedes McCambridge would ever have gotten on a jury where Todd was the defendant.
As someone who knew the defendant that is impossible.McCambridge is the reason to see this film, her intense style of acting carries it over a lot of rough patches, but not enough.
Ruth Roman on vacation for her health gets involved in the local controversies where Todd's arrest and trials for murdering his tramp of a wife are the number one subject of local gossip.
Roman stays at a dude ranch run by Mercedes and her brother Darryl Hickman.
And she falls for Todd, but soon the doubts appear.Zachary Scott is on hand as well in a surprisingly small role as a rather sleazy playboy.
Scott is always good, we should have seen more of him.Lightning Strikes Twice has not worn well over the years..
Ruth Roman is stuck starring in a rather dopey movie.
The acting is generally good and the atmosphere also quite good...but the plot is just stupid.The film begins with a man being re-tried in court for murdering his wife.
In the next scene, a New Yorker, Shelly (Roman), travels to the desert on a vacation to a dude ranch.
The lady in charge was apparently a friend of the accused murderer and was also on the jury at his trial*.
Some other stuff happens and soon she's in love with this man for no apparent reason...and then they get married!
My problem is that no matter whether or not the acting and direction are any good or not, the story is so full of dumb holes that I found myself just wanting the film to end.*Someone who is a friend of an accused killer would NEVER be allowed on a jury...never.
This made even less sense than the other woman almost instantly falling for Richard and marrying him..
I won't do it here."Lightning Strikes Twice" stars Ruth Roman, Richard Todd, Mercedes McCambridge, and Zachary Scott.
Roman plays an actress, Shelley Carnes, who has been sent out west for her health and is going to a dude ranch.
The talk on the train is about Richard Trevelyan who was convicted of murdering his wife and received a death sentence.
He was given a stay of execution pending a new trial and freed because the jury had one holdout who thought he was not guilty.When her car gets stuck in the mud, Shelley is helped by a man in a house nearby, who turns out to be Trevelyan.
She is invited by the caretakers Liza and String (McCambridge and Darryl Hickman) to stay for a few days anyway.
Liza believes in his innocence.Shelley meets Richard again, and the two of them fall in love.
This noirish film was a nice diversion thanks to the acting, but it had a few problems.
Roman and Todd are madly in love after one kiss and a couple of days.
Third, why was Zachary Scott in this film?
Talk about being superfluous, and he was hardly in it anyway.Richard Todd is miscast as Trevelyan.
He and Roman make a beautiful couple, and Todd was a good actor, but he is out of place in the west, given his accent and bearing.
As someone on the board suggested, Scott may have been a better choice for the role, or Jim Davis.The rest of the acting is very good, with a strong performance by Mercedes McCambridge and a solid one by Roman.
While staying at a deserted dude ranch, a woman (Roman) gets involved with a man (Todd) suspected of murderApparently, the movie was intended to showcase rising stars Roman, Todd, and Mc Cambridge.
Too bad because it's a waste of some fine performers like Conroy, Givney, and especially Scott.There is one ridiculous scene almost worth the overlong 90-minutes.
That's where Todd and Roman decide to have a romantic interlude perched atop a narrow cliff.
Now, why a woman would choose a drop-off as a trysting spot with a suspected wife killer remains the movie's biggest mystery.
Richard Todd's blazing eyes, all two of them.
This is a superb King Vidor film noir, made only two years after his ultimate masterpiece, THE FOUNTAINHEAD (1949).
The female lead in this film was that very fifties woman, Ruth Roman, who appeared in film after film in those days.
All of her mannerisms and assumptions positively reek of the Eisenhower Era. The mesmerising performance of Richard Todd is what really makes this film work.
His eyes blaze with ambivalent intensity, like two searchlights, as he stares at Ruth Roman and we and she try to guess is he a good guy or a bad guy.
Scott keeps 'lech-ing' round Ruth Roman, can't keep his eyes off her, and that goes for his hands too.
The film has a strong, tormented performance from Mercedes McCambridge, in only her fifth role.
She had commenced her film career in the hit ALL THE KING'S MEN (1949) only two years earlier, and five years after this she was to play perhaps her best known role of all in GIANT (1956) with James Dean.
(Don't over-pious, patronising priests like that make you sick, especially when they have pet Hispanics hanging around to prove how broad-minded they are?) This film is set way out West somewhere, where the desert is threatening.
This murder mystery is a twister, and it wriggles like a rattler..
You know something's wrong with a film when you keep asking yourself, in the middle of plot complications, where is Zachary Scott?
And after watching the film, it's clear that he would have been a better choice than Richard Todd to play the man suspected of killing his wife, rather than the playboy cad he always played.Richard Todd almost sleepwalks his way through his miscast role as a newly released jailbird exonerated of being guilty, except when staring intensely at Ruth Roman.
Poor Ruth Roman has a heck of a time trying to decide which side to take in the stories she's heard about a man suspected of killing his wife.
She meets that man (Richard Todd) on a dark and stormy night and from that moment on it's anyone's guess as to whom the real culprit is.Is he going to tell her what really happened to his murdered wife or is he staying mum to hide the truth or shield someone else?
Roman's character accepts Todd's innocence long before she has any right to do so, and the Mercedes McCambridge character is never given enough depth to suddenly change and revert to someone else for the final showdown.Everyone acts with their face toward the camera rather than facing each other whenever there's a moment of confrontation or even an intimate chat taking place.
Unfortunately, it comes across as making the acting seem ludicrously over-the-top--no subtlety at all.Ruth Roman and Mercedes McCambridge, more than anyone else in the cast, uses this emoting device throughout.
This seems to be a trademark of '50s acting--or at least it is under King Vidor's direction.Despite its faults, LIGHTNING STRIKES TWICE remains watchable and taut as it winds its way toward a twisted resolution.
Richard and Shelley?No, Harvey and Liza!.
King Vidor's movie are at their best when they depict greed,passion,mad love ,hate: so are "Duel in the sun" "fountainhead" "beyond the forest " and "Ruby Gentry" .Jennifer Jones was par excellence the romantic actress ,Bette Davis ("Beyond the forest") was at her bitchiest .Ruth Roman is too cold and too emotionally remote to convey such feelings.I'm much more interested in Mercedes McCambridge's Liza but sadly her part is underwritten and except in her final scenes she is not given a single chance to shine.Ditto for Richard Todd as Richard: we want more of Zachary Scott ,whose character is much less bland than the hero.Todd/Roman are an unexciting pairing.That said,it is a well-told story even if there are plot holes .But the film lacks focus ,intensity,madness,Vidor's trademark..
The beginning pulled me in, Ruth Roman shows a nice soft-yet-spunky ingénue side here, a little different from some of her other work, where she seems more hard-edged.
Overcooked Melodrama that is Quite Silly at Times and the Plot is Contrived to make things Come Together and the Result is Manufactured Suspense.
The Cast is a bit Offbeat with Mercedes Cambridge Chewing the Scenery and Ruth Roman Looking Confused most of the Time.
Zachary Scott shows up to make things Interesting but is mostly there to just Paw the Reluctant Lead Actress.It is Heavy Handed Stuff with Thunder Crashes and Telegraphed Terror (a spider on the bed is mistaken for an attempted murder), but it is Professionally done by the Filmmakers.
For a start we have the solid mahogany Richard Todd leaving a trail of sawdust in his wake whilst Zachary Scott who can and does act Todd off the screen doesn't even appear until about reel #6 and is woefully under extended.
Ruth Roman might have done really well as the femme lead - if she wasn't in the same movie as Mercedes McCambridge - things are tough all over, it would seem.
Plot-wise it's as hokey as they come; we open with Todd on Death Row on account of a little matter of murdering his wife then, with no groundwork/back-story to help us he is awarded first a stay of execution and then a re-trial which leaves him a free man.
Enter Ruth Roman, actress on vacation/convalescence who falls instantly into fascination with Todd.
This is noir-lite with two excellent performances from Scott and McCambridge, a solid one from Roman and Todd having a laugh..
Terrible movie.McCambridge was all but chewing on the curtains.
Richard Todd looked good as usual but deserved a better script.
Ruth Roman was pretty good but must have needed the paycheck badly.
She goes to find Richard Todd and does a very poor job of acting like she is afraid of heights up on the cliff.
How come he is riding the same horse that Ruth was on at the dude ranch.
He takes Ruth for a car ride acting very menacing, so of course we suspect he may be a killer.
He takes Ruth to see Todd and drives off.
Later Todd takes Ruth home in the same car.
Sadly Ruth marries Todd after knowing him for only a few days.
A low-budget murder mystery and undemanding time-killer – which is a real shame.
The characters are both realistically written and tautly played by a well-night perfect cast: Richard Todd, in his first American film, plays with customary charm and stolidity – although not always photographed from the most flattering angles, particularly in his reverse shots.
Ruth Roman is delightfully sultry even in what – despite the movie's poster art – is decidedly a goody-two-shoes role.
Mercedes McCambridge is her usual neurotic character.
Zachary Scott makes a late entrance – 60 minutes late to be precise – but proves a diverting red herring at a point in the narrative where interesting was just beginning to flag.
With just a little bit more money up front, this could have been a high-class mystery yarn, even though the identity of the killer is obvious..
The film should have concentrated more on the Mercedes McCambridge character and for what love of Richard Todd forced her to do.
Rather, we're focused on the quick romantic situation between Todd and Ruth Roman leading to a quick marriage.
Of course, Todd has been acquitted of killing his trollop wife but suspicion of him remains.Nothing is elaborated regarding the Hickman character, brother to McCambridge and prone to outbursts.
Ditto for the usually suave Zachary Scott, a lover of the murdered girl.Who is that woman loaning out her car?
Why not talk more of the Roman character's acting on the New York stage?.
As plenty of reviewers have said, the plot doesn't add up: Liza (Mercedes McCambridge) magical appearance on Richard's (Richard Todd's) jury, and Shelley (Ruth Roman) falling in love with Richard as though he were the last man on Earth make Texas-sized loopholes.
I agree too with those who mention that most of the performances are quite good, the atmosphere has a rustic-noir cast to it, and there's a consistent tone.Particularly interesting is Zachary Scott's Henry, a sort of playboy foil to the stoic Richard.
Liza caught him messing with Lorraine, the murdered wife in question.
That she makes herself relevant by falling in love with Richard is merely convenient for the plot.There ought to be a nefarious reason to use Shelley; if she had been from the town she might be usefully framed for Lorraine's murder.
Actually, the murder mystery is pretty good as is.
In fact, the tarantula-in-the-bed looks like a ploy for a psychopathic Richard if his intent to kill Shelley backfires.
At that point, he acts like a murderer.
Since Liza has been chewing things up for most of the movie, it's not surprising that she's involved.
As a whole, though, Lightning Strikes Twice does get some things right.
Shelley's approach to the house on that first rainy night has Richard's wonderfully creepy reflection appear behind her in the window.
Plus, it's not really his house, the dude ranch is not really open, and Richard, as a foster child, is something of a stranger-in-a-strange-land.
The priest's flasback gives us a good set-up of the murder scene.Unfortunately, the Hispanic characters mostly function as useful ornaments, barely even two-dimensional.
She could've been woven into the plot; maybe there's another angle in the mystery for one of the ranch hands...in any case, Tumble Moon is an excellent name.