Twilight of Honor
First screened and reviewed in July 2021
Director: Boris Sagal. Cast: Richard Chamberlain, Nick Adams, Joey Heatherton, Claude Rains, Joan Blackman, James Gregory, Pat Buttram, Jeanette Nolan. Screenplay: Henry Denker (based on the novel by Al Dewlen).

 In Brief:  Fully evident what this movie aspires to be, but mediocre acting and affected style keep it from getting close.

VOR: ②  Enough showy grammar and enough investment in PR that the team clearly felt they had Something, but I couldn't remember it hours later.


   
Photo © 1963 MGM / Perlberg-Seaton Productions
Richard Chamberlain and his team were evidently miffed that Twilight of Honor didn't catapult him from TV stardom, born of Dr. Kildare, into the big leagues of moviemaking. The sad fact is that he's utterly unremarkable as an up-and-coming defense attorney keen to exonerate a man on trial for a murder to which he's repeatedly confessed. Chamberlain finds no angles whatsoever on this character, whose legal genius isn't all that palpable and whose painful backstory as a young widower is a script assertion that the actor never makes us feel. Granted, actors have been launched into movie stardom for less, but the real problem is that Twilight of Honor itself is so ersatz, simultaneously tepid and humid. The movie feels like an inexperienced producer shoved Anatomy of a Murder into an oven, set the broiler on High, and hoped for the best without working too hard for it.

The legal and extralegal proceedings are even more lurid this time around, but without any of the cruel, spooky finesse of Preminger's picture. Joey Heatherton, future heiress of the Happy Hooker franchise, got some brief attention for trying to out-Sue Lyon Sue Lyon in her role as a vicious slattern, plainly guilty of more than she admits. Storied players like Claude Rains (in his second-to-last performance) and Jeanette Nolan demonstrate more control over their craft, but even they seem slightly undone by the script's thin but shouty obsessions with murder, adultery, impotence, and judicial corruption. The photography by David Lathrop alternates between passable elegance and bland indifference, especially when it comes to shot composition, and the movie misses chance after chance to conjure a sense of stakes or even of place, or to generate some charge from its serial flashbacks, superimpositions, and showy frames-within-frames.

Given the across-the-board mediocrity, it's all the more amazing that Nick Adams managed to reap an Oscar nomination as the defendant. Playing dazed, he reads as drugged. Worse for him, Adams subscribed to the Chill Wills Playbook for lavishly hyping one's own nomination, such that he likely alienated more voters than he enticed. When he lost to Melvyn Douglas in Hud (one of the best winners in that category's history), Adams is widely reported to have suffered a kind of nervous breakdown. Within two years, he was headlining Frankenstein vs. Baragon, and three years after that, endlessly frustrated that his career never became what he fantasized or felt he deserved, he committed suicide. Now, there's a sad, strange, grimy story that someone might make a halfway compelling movie about. Chamberlain might even have been well-cast in the lead! But it's never a good sign when your salacious, overconfident film seems duller than a movie one might make about it. Grade: C

(I originally wrote this review on Letterboxd, where you can comment.)

Academy Award Nominations:
Best Supporting Actor: Nick Adams
Best Art Direction–Set Decoration: George W. Davis, Paul Groesse, Henry Grace, Hugh Hunt

Golden Globe Nominations:
Most Promising Newcomer (Female): Joey Heatherton
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