Susan Hayward never lets her foot up. As Lillian Roth in I'll Cry Tomorrow, she sticks with her strident, pedal-to-the-floor style. Whether she's belting out 'Sing, You Sinners' on a Paramount set, screeching at her mother or one of her husbands, or writhing with the D.T.s, Hayward elbows Roth clear off the screen.
And that's a shame, because this story of a singer laid low by her alcoholism (based on Roth's memoir) doesn't need turbocharging. But, like his star, director Daniel Mann keeps twisting the dials up to 10, opting inflexibly for ear-splitting melodrama over quieter insight. Those necessary connecting passages hold little interest for him. So, with abrupt, disorienting shifts of time and locale, the movie judders along from one star turn to the next (as would, two years later, the almost identical The Helen Morgan Story).
In his rush to get to the juicy parts when Roth starts sliding off banquettes in ritzy nightclubs, he whizzes through the Lower East Side shtik of stage-mama Jo Van Fleet pushing young Roth in front of the footlights, and through a pivotal romance with childhood sweetheart Ray Danton (his death starts her drinking). During a blackout, she marries a stage-door Johnny; after a drunken spat, it's suddenly two years later and he's long gone. From Roth's lavish layout in Manhattan, she boards a train and ends up in a dump of a Los Angeles apartment; we're left to supply the why.
When cool sadist Richard Conte enters her life, all but twirling a moustache, he slows things down a bit. But it's never clear who he is or why he married her. For her fame and money? Or just because he needed a vulnerable victim to torment? Leaving him furtively in the middle of the night, she stumbles around the Bowery for days? Weeks? Years? The director's grasp of the passage of time is as slippery as his subject's.
Most centrally, we never see the precise point when she becomes unreliable unemployable. In one of the most affecting scenes, when she can barely walk but must perform, she tells a grip 'Better put the chair on the stage.' But then, propped against it, she sings the truest, most understated number in the movie, 'Happiness Is A Thing Called Joe.'
Finally, after failing to hurl herself out a hotel window, Hayward/Roth creeps into AA. But even that venerable fellowship gets treated to a full Hollywood rewrite. She and sponsor Eddie Albert fall in love, she turns the meetings into her private cabaret, and then goes on This Is Your Life to tell her story on national television (so much for principles before personalities).
As a tale of transformation, I'll Cry Tomorrow is seldom less than fascinating. But it's not as much a journey from alcoholic squalor into sobriety as it is the change from a heartfelt account of recovery into an ambitious actress' overwrought bid for an Oscar.
And that's a shame, because this story of a singer laid low by her alcoholism (based on Roth's memoir) doesn't need turbocharging. But, like his star, director Daniel Mann keeps twisting the dials up to 10, opting inflexibly for ear-splitting melodrama over quieter insight. Those necessary connecting passages hold little interest for him. So, with abrupt, disorienting shifts of time and locale, the movie judders along from one star turn to the next (as would, two years later, the almost identical The Helen Morgan Story).
In his rush to get to the juicy parts when Roth starts sliding off banquettes in ritzy nightclubs, he whizzes through the Lower East Side shtik of stage-mama Jo Van Fleet pushing young Roth in front of the footlights, and through a pivotal romance with childhood sweetheart Ray Danton (his death starts her drinking). During a blackout, she marries a stage-door Johnny; after a drunken spat, it's suddenly two years later and he's long gone. From Roth's lavish layout in Manhattan, she boards a train and ends up in a dump of a Los Angeles apartment; we're left to supply the why.
When cool sadist Richard Conte enters her life, all but twirling a moustache, he slows things down a bit. But it's never clear who he is or why he married her. For her fame and money? Or just because he needed a vulnerable victim to torment? Leaving him furtively in the middle of the night, she stumbles around the Bowery for days? Weeks? Years? The director's grasp of the passage of time is as slippery as his subject's.
Most centrally, we never see the precise point when she becomes unreliable unemployable. In one of the most affecting scenes, when she can barely walk but must perform, she tells a grip 'Better put the chair on the stage.' But then, propped against it, she sings the truest, most understated number in the movie, 'Happiness Is A Thing Called Joe.'
Finally, after failing to hurl herself out a hotel window, Hayward/Roth creeps into AA. But even that venerable fellowship gets treated to a full Hollywood rewrite. She and sponsor Eddie Albert fall in love, she turns the meetings into her private cabaret, and then goes on This Is Your Life to tell her story on national television (so much for principles before personalities).
As a tale of transformation, I'll Cry Tomorrow is seldom less than fascinating. But it's not as much a journey from alcoholic squalor into sobriety as it is the change from a heartfelt account of recovery into an ambitious actress' overwrought bid for an Oscar.