Dean Jagger

When Strangers Marry

by
Millie with new husband Paul

A peculiar, interesting and not entirely coherent crime thriller about a woman who marries a man she barely knows and then starts wondering if he’s a killer. When Strangers Marry makes more sense as a title than Betrayed, which is the flag it flew under when it was re-released in 1949, five years after its debut. The re-release also allowed a bit of rejigging of the pecking order. Third-billed Robert Mitchum – who’d become a star in the interim – is top-billed second time round. To be fair to everyone, Mitchum is in it more than Dean Jagger, who plays the mysterious salesman Kim Hunter’s wide-eyed Millie Baxter has married more or less … Read more

Western Union

by
Randolph Scott in hat

A nice 95-minute advertisement for a company still with us, 1941’s Western Union is appropriately both a western and about the Union, being an adaptation of a Zane Grey story about how the west was won, or at least connected up to the rest of the United States, by telegraph wire. In linking coast to coast, telegraph company Western Union helped forge the country into a more solid political entity. Three men dominate the action – Randolph Scott as Vance Shaw, a loner former outlaw and fixer persuaded to join the drive to lay cable across terrain good and bad. Robert Young plays rich man’s son Richard Blake, an engineer who is also … Read more