Fred Zinnemann's dud

I've mentioned before that pretty much every actor and director has at least one dud in their oeuvre. For director Fred Zinneman, that would be Teresa, which is going to be on TCM tomorrow morning at 7:00 AM is you want to watch and judge for yourself.

John Ericson is technically the star here, although he's obviously not Teresa. He's Philip Cass, a World War II veteran who is without a job and, when it comes to dealing with the unemployment office, he finds that he's unable to, running away when he gets to the front of the line.

Clearly something is wrong with him, so he goes to see the psychiatrist provided him by the Veterans' Administration for some talk therapy, played by Rod Steiger in an early role. Philip has problems with his parents, and says that the one person who could truly make him feel "safe" is Sgt. Dobbs.

Flash back to the war. Philip served in Italy, and one day he and some other stragglers wind up in a small village where the most senior officer is Sgt. Dobbs (Ralph Meeker). Dobbs has Philip and a couple of other men billet with one of the families, which is where they meet Teresa (Pier Angeli). Philip takes a liking to her, but there's still that war to fight. But when it comes time to fight, Philip chickens out, not even being able to light a flare, a mistake which kills Dobbs, as Philip learns in a military hospital where he's been taken for combat fatigue, since it's clear he's got something wrong with him.

The Allies go on to win the war, of course, and Philip is able to return to the village where he met Teresa. She's still there, and he decides to marry her, although he's going to have to leave her behind in Italy for a while until all the paperwork for bringing a war bride back to the States can be worked out.

Philip is such a coward that when he returns home, he can't even bother to tell his family (sister Peggy Ann Garner, mom Patricia Collinge, and dad Richard Bishop) that he's gotten married! Mom only finds out because Philip hid the license and a picture from the wedding up on a china cabinet, and Mom dusts like a good housewife and finds it. Boy is she going to be pissed, and frankly with good reason. But she's also such a passive-aggressive bitch about it once Teresa actually arrives in America.

All of those war marriages were tough once people had to adjust to the war being over and finding out that the person they married in haste might not be quite the same person now that it's peacetime. Teresa certainly didn't have any way of knowing what a coward Philip is, or why, while Philip really needs to get his head on straight.

The box guide synopses I've seen of Teresa suggest that it's a movie about Philip and Teresa's struggle to adjust to married life after the war and having to live with Philip's family. If it had been that, it might not have been a half-bad movie. But it's really about Philip and his psychological struggles, and that causes serious problems for the movie. First Ericson is entirely too lightweight for the role, which really needed somebody like a Gregory Peck. He's also unsympathetic for most of the picture.

The other problem the movie has is that it jumps around way too much, handling a whole bunch of difficult topics, and never giving enough attention to any of them. The ending also feels tacked on and entirely phony, as if they didn't know how to resolve the problems they set up for themselves. At least Virginia Mayo had the good sense to walk out on Dana Andrews in The Best Years of Our Lives.

Teresa doesn't seem to be on DVD, so you're going to have to catch the TCM showing.