IN answer to the demand for movies that make you suspect psychopathological goings-on in everyone from friend to family dog (yesterday’s heroes killed Indians, today’s are associated one way or another with psychiatry), MGM has reissued a pokey oldie called “Rage in Heaven.” This relic starts at a lonely asylum with a comic-opera escape by an unidentified inmate (Robert Montgomery) who is known to be paranoid only by the asylum doctor (Oscar Homolka, who gives an embarrassing rendition of a Katzenjammer psychiatrist). The inmate is a prince of a fellow, bursting with paranoid symptoms that for a remarkable period of time escape detection by his admiring public—he spies from trees, is afraid of the moon, assumes the name of his best friend (George Sanders), is suspicious of everybody. As can happen only in Hollywood, after spying on her from a tree and exchanging a few unromantic words, he becomes married to lovely, dewy, innocent Ingrid Bergman, and is well on his way to ruining her glowing and enchanted existence and his family’s prosperous steel empire. He destroys even Miss Bergman’s brand of worshipful love by his attempts to involve her in a love affair with his best friend. His last act is to arrange his suicide so that it will look as if his friend had stabbed him.
I can’t remember any Hollywood effort that pounded so relentlessly on the fact of the hero’s insanity. Montgomery makes Philip a fascinating figure as a detached, woodenish, uncertain person whose movements lack conviction because in the same moment he seems both a scared boy and an arrogant person who thinks himself omnipotent. This is brought out beautifully in the one exciting episode, in which some ferocious steel workers crash their employer’s office to get at Philip. Philip, afraid of appearing a coward, makes some imperious, tentative, puppetlike moves to control the men and then, in an equally wooden, boyish way loses his nerve and flees. The scene, paced slowly and jerkily, manages to achieve a remarkable projection of fear and the tortured working of a sick mind.
“Rage in Heaven” is crammed with excellent players. Miss Bergman is completely unaffected—charming in her wifely concern as she proudly watches Philip officiate at a director’s meeting—without any of the polish and over-ambitious acting of her work in “Notorious” and “Spellbound.” With sparkling loveliness, she projects so pure an air of enchanted, yearning innocence that she seems out of place in this picture among so many artful old hands. Lucile Watson, as Philip’s adoring, over-protective mother, is brusque and very effective. She is particularly convincing after the suicide, when she seems smaller, shrunken, ravaged and almost hallucinated.
The production is one of MGM’s stock-in-trade grandiose jobs. Philip’s office at the foundry, appearing rather stunted in the movie, couldn’t house more than eight or nine trains.
November 25, 1946