Woman Obsessed

I found the title of this film slightly misleading as Susan Hayward shuns her glamorous looks to play "Mary". She lives happily with her husband and young son "Robbie" (Dennis Holmes) until a forest fire renders her a widow and she really begins to struggle to maintain their small farm. Things might improve though when "Fred" (Stephen Boyd) arrives on the scene. He had been working at a local lumber mill but the conflagration put paid to that. For C$80 per month, he agree to stick around the place and help out. He sleeps in an annexe to the barn and as time passes it becomes clear what's going to happen next... "Fred" has something of the "Jekyll" to him though, and as he struggles to relate to the youngster and increasingly to his new wife, we discover that he has some baggage of his own and that is seriously compromising his new family. Tempers - and the weather - flare up and soon lives are in danger. Boyd does an ok job here, but is hampered by the scope of his character. The man we see at the start of the film isn't really the violent, bad-tempered, man we see in the middle - and we only have sparse crumbs to explain this change from the rather undercooked screenplay. The production benefits from some fine cinematography, it also suffers from some clearly studio based external scenes and a snow storm that must have all but exhausted the Californian confetti supply. Hayward offers a convincing performance here as the doting mother and the film tells a story of the pioneering spirit from a slightly different perspective.

Susan Hayward, to me, played a woman obsessed with not letting go -- of her dead husband and her past life with him.By refusing to grieve and face her present life and future, she takes herself, her son and new husband to the edge of destruction. The major actors did an excellent job of characterizing individuals who are caught in a cycle of rigidity -- rigidity of emotions, personal boundaries and lifestyle. An excellent study.

Susan Hayward's excellence never comes as any surprise, because she could do anything. From a country preacher's wife in 'I'd Climb the Highest Mountain', to the executed (probable) murderess in 'I Want to Live', the pushy garment district broad in 'I Can Get It For You Wholesale', she also did comedy in 'The Marriage Go-Round' and played Bette Davis's nympho daughter in 'Where Love Has Gone'. These off-the-top-of-my-head roles barely scratch the surface, of course, of her peerless range.

Stephen Boyd is the rustic who comes to help out on the farm after Hayward is left with her son--played by an excellent, most sensitive child actor, Dennis Holmes--after her husband is killed fighting a fire. And Boyd is marvelous: strapping, rangy and handsome, crude and violent, and the plot twists around nicely on the refinements of life versus the necessities: During the first half, it seems as if Boyd's uncouthness is the only real urgency to be dissolved or removed; toward the end it seems as if Hayward has not been understanding enough. She would have been had he not been so inarticulate, of course. Nevertheless, this film is complex enough in terms of relationships and matters of making judgments and searching for compromises that are tolerable for different kinds of sensibilities--there are intelligent moments in which the local doctor seems to serve as psychoanalyst for both husband and wife.

It is a shame that these two weren't also paired as Oliver Mellors and Constance Chatterley: they look the parts (and could have certainly done them well) far more than any versions thus far made (and it's hard to imagine any more will be needed.)

Another recapturing of something I missed 45 years ago, when one Sunday afternoon I couldn't "go to the show" and had to go to my aunt's far older husband's birthday party, or it was their anniversary in their house in Ozark, Alabama...I hated it, but seeing this finally after all these years--and the nature of the film itself has something to do with this too--has made me happy I saw my ancient old uncle, who had once been a probate judge--and I saw him but one more time. I'd been unkind. And only now can I remember how important I know it was for him that I be there.

This was one of the most worthwhile of my childhood/teenage movie deprivations. The scene toward the end in which Robbie (Holmes) tries to kill Frank (Boyd) by leading him into the quagmire (advertised so many times previously in the film I thought the title of the film was going to be about how Robbie fell into the quicksand and Sharron (Hayward) actually became OBSESSED! since her grief for her first husband's death and her disgust at her new husband's crudeness would have been just cause if then combined with the death of her son, too; she does have a miscarriage, but that is not quite the same)and then helps him pull himself out with a tree limb--this is a truly touching and tender moment.

The only really unconvincing thing about this movie is the title: Hayward's character is under great hardship, but her reactions to the rough nature of Boyd's character are normal to say the least. She makes some mistakes, but she is just NOT a WOMAN OBSESSED. This ranks as perhaps the most misleading title I have yet encountered.

The photography, in the Canadian Rockies, is often breathtaking.

Barbara Nichols is perfectly refreshingly racily divine as a gossipy town blonde babe.

Producer Sydney Boehm also adapted John Mantley's book for the screen, an emotionally-tangled tale of a widow and her young son in Saskatchewan who advertise for help running their farm; a rugged yet oddly child-like logger (and an acquaintance of the widow's late husband) takes the job, while gossiping tongues wag back in town. Seems the logger has a chequered past and a mercurial temper, which should send warning signs to our heroine (Susan Hayward)--who ends up doing what all simp-heroines in soap operas do, she marries him! The opening prologue of about 12 minutes could have been dispatched with just two or three lines of dialogue, while the mix of on-location photography, studio shots and intermittent nature footage causes the film's visual sense to look mighty inconsistent. The exteriors are very pretty, yet the human drama at the forefront is blobby and unformed (particularly with Stephen Boyd's character). Hayward is less domineering than usual (and she seems to fall down a lot around horses!), but playing Mommy doesn't appear to be her forté. **1/2 from ****

After seeing Woman Obsessed, I realize that the Hollywood film industry lost such a talent when the great Susan Hayward died in March, 1975.

She epitomizes troubled women in one film after another. She was so good at it and Woman Obsessed is no exception.

As a remarried woman, still haunted by the tragic death of her first husband, Hayward shows mighty grit in this film with an on par terrific performance by Stephen Boyd, so great that year as Massala in Ben-Hur.

Boyd, as the second husband, appears bully-like in the treatment of Hayward's young son, who turns in quite a performance himself.

What made this flick so good was the wonderful compelling ending where reconciliation and good judgment come together.

***1/2 for a very good film.