Lightning Strikes Twice

Unfortunately, I didn't pay attention to the dates that the Mercedes McCambridge films that I watched off the Watch TCM app are leaving the app. Angel Baby, which I blogged about back on Saturday, is still available until December 31, while the other one that I watched, Lightning Strikes Twice, is only availbale through Dec. 8. So that's why you're getting posts on the two movies a few days apart rather than a few weeks apart.

Once again, McCambridge isn't the star of the movie, but in a supporting role, so we don't see her for a while. The real lead is played by Ruth Roman. When we first see her character, Shelley Carnes, a couple of minutes into the movie, she's on a bus somehwere in the desert west (IMDb suggests Victorville, out in San Bernadino County CA is the filming location for the establishing scenes, while Wikipedia claims it's set in Texas), on her way to a place called El Llano. In the area, the big story is over something called the Trevelyan trial, which of course Shelley would know nothing about.

Trevelyan (Richard Todd) had been on trial twice, for killing his wife. The first trial landed him on death row, but he was able to appeal his case and get a new trial, which ended with a hung jury after one juror refused to convict. And since this is a sparsely populated area, it's one of those places where everybody seems to know everybody else, excepting Shelley of course since she's new to the area. Shelley is an actress who suffered some health issues, so the touring company she's a part of has suggested she go to someplace in the middle of nowhere for a rest cure. She first spends a night at a place run by the Nolans, who take to her enough that they're willing to trust her with the job of ferrying one of their cars to a place even more in the middle of nowhere, and without good maps, these being the days before Rand and McNally's road atlases being widely available.

Needless to say, Shelley gets lost, and winds up spending a night at a house in the middle of nowhere, which is where she meets a man she thinks at first owns the place. But no; the man she meets is Trevelyan. He insists that he's innocent of the crime of killing his wife, and after another meeting out in the scrub desert, the two begin to fall in love. This is an obvious problem considering that Trevelyan may be a wife-killer. At least he's got the opportunity of a job offer that will take him away from the place, courtesy of his best friend and a fellow rancher in the area, Harvey Turner (Zachary Scott).

Eventually, Shelley gets to the "dude ranch" where she's supposed to go for her rest cure, only to find that the place is closed for... reasons. The place is run by Liza (that's Mercedes McCambridge) and her kid brother String (Darryl Hickman), on crutches from what was probably a polio case (apparently he recovered from his drowning in Leave Her to Heaven). We then learn that Liza was the juror who held out for acquittal in the second trial, on the grounds that some people just needed killing, and that Mrs. Trevelyan was one of those people.

As we learn more about the case, the love between Trevelyan and Shelley progresses to the point that he proposes to her. The case also progresses in such a way that Shelley begins to doubt whether he really is innocent of the crime for which he was on trial, leading to a fairly ridiculous finale that satisfies the Production Code at least.

Lightning Strikes Twice is one of those movies that takes a lot of suspension of disbelief, and also feels more like the sort of thing that a few years later would have worked better as episodic TV, with a policeman or detective at the heart of it and all of these characters being guest stars -- I can imagine Jessica Fletcher solving a mystery like this on Murder, She Wrote. It's not terrible, but it's certainly not great. Everybody here is professional, but at the same time it's not the sort of thing that would be at the top of their résumés.