Twist of Fate (1954) User Reviews

nothing new here but a good cast

[blanche-2 · 6/10 · 2 October 2013]

Ginger Rogers stars with Stanley Baker and Herbert Lom in "Twist of Fate," a 1954 film shot on location in the Riviera. Even in black and white, the scenery is wonderful.

Rogers is Johnny, an ex-showgirl living on the largesse of her sugar daddy Louis Galt (Baker), who's been separated from his wife supposedly for years and whose divorce will be final any minute. After a fight with him, she runs off and has a minor accident with her car. Going to the nearest house, she meets Pierre (Jacques Bergerac). (In real life, Rogers had the same reaction when she saw him as Dorothy Malone did - she married him.) Johnny and Pierre fall in love, and she wants to leave Louis. First of all, he's a criminal, though she's unaware of this; secondly, he's been lying to her, which she finds out the night of the accident; and thirdly, he turns out to have a violent streak. He announces that he won't let her leave.

Louis sees that the diamond bracelet he gave her is in the hands of a con man (Herbert Lom) and thinks he's her lover. That's where the twist of fate comes in.

Very derivative film, with Rogers excellent as Johnny, and with good performances by Baker and Lom, both scary in different ways.

Jacques Bergerac was a handsome Fremchman, and that was about it. My mother once told me, "He was someone who married beautiful actresses." After he had married a couple of them and done some films, he became the head of Revlon's Paris office. Bless his heart, at 86, he's still with us.

A waste of good Ginger

[mls4182 · 5/10 · 28 June 2021]

By the 1950s, Ginger Rogers had proved several times over that she was an excellent dramatic actress. Why she chose this project is beyond me. Was it to showcase her new actor husband? Ginger looks wonderful. Her clothes are stylish. The sets are lavish. The locales are beautiful (even in black and white). The script and plot seen to be an afterthought.

If seeing Ginger and her two handsome leading men is enough for you, this is worth viewing. Don't expect to be otherwise entertained.

I can feel a new expression on my face when he walks into the room

[ulicknormanowen · 6/10 · 21 January 2022]

A rather smart plot ,gambling on the mistaken identities; the characters are cardboard, except for Herbert Lom's , the loser flesh on the bone with a lot of self-pity : Lom ' s performance gives the story a little substance , his playing often resembling Peter Lorre's .As for Johnny , to put it mildly ,her generosity verges on naiveté.

French Jacques Bergerac only made two movies in his native country where he remained virtually unknown ; and abroad,he could never become the French lover, as Charles Boyer and Louis Jourdan did : a pretty face and a slight accent are not enough.

Ginger Rogers Looks Great

[drednm · 26 May 2007]

Decent little thriller with an oddly cast Stanley Baker and hard-to-understand Jacques Bergerac, but the story is pretty good: about the mistaken identity of a thief amid the lies and deceptions of others.

Ginger Rogers plays a third-rate performer who is shacked up with Baker, a wealthy businessman. They have a fabulous house in Cannes, and everything seems to me going well until an old acquaintance turns us (Herbert Lom) who seems to bring bad luck to anyone he associates with. Aside from that he is a thief. Rogers soon learns that Baker is really not separated from his wife (Margaret Rawlings) or divorcing her. He's also a crook. In a snit of hysterics, she almost drives her Rolls over a sea cliff and wanders to a funky beach house where she meets Bergerac. They fall in love. But how to get rid of Baker? Meanwhile, Lom robs the Cannes house and the diamond bracelet he steals ends up back with Baker, who gave it to Rogers. So he assumes Rogers and Lom are an item. From there everything goes wrong with botched killing attempts, escapes, and each person trying to figure out who is with who.

Rogers looks great and acts imperiled well but beyond that has little to do in the finale as the men thrash it out on the sea cliffs. Lom turns in an excellent and subtle Peter Lorre like performance. Coral Browne steals the one scene she is in. Atmospheric and tense and not bad at all.

Perpetual Motion

[LeonLouisRicci · 7/10 · 27 September 2013]

Lively and Lovely to Look at Movie that moves rapidly here and there with Everyone trying to figure out Who is Who and What is What and is breathless to say the least. The Cast, including the Dramatization of Ginger Rogers Career is OK if nothing remarkable. It is the Action and the Intrigue that Star here.

Some on location Photography and Criminal behavior Spice things up beyond the rather Bland Romance Angles. There are extended Fight Scenes, Misidentifications, Smuggling, Thievery, and Murder, Adultery, Betrayal, and after all, a Deathbed confession that thankfully, and predictably clears things up.

There is enough here to recommend because once things get going it is all in Perpetual Motion that makes for a Fun Film Experience, although it fails to be sharp enough for it to rise above expectations, but it does manage to deliver just that.

Ginger Rogers in France

[dsewizzrd-1 · 6/10 · 7 April 2016]

Ginger Rogers stars in this portmanteau of romance and thriller, which is called "Beautiful Stranger" on the title. Eddie Byrne is his usual disreputable self - "I stole it, I'm innocent".

Rogers is the girlfriend of an apparently reputable millionaire living on a continental island when she meets a young potter at a bijou beatnik house on the coast.

Bizarrely, her Rolls Royce keeps changing colour from white to silver, even during car chases. I'm not sure if this is a filming fault, because of film processing, or a mistake made in digitisation.

Eddie creeps around a house and the potter looks outside but doesn't see his Citroen (the same one as used by the police) parked clearly in front of the house. The same white telephone is used throughout the house and office.

we don't care about anything at all

[christopher-underwood · 5/10 · 21 June 2019]

This is problematic from the start. Stanley Baker seems okay but while he enthuses over his young love we are only too aware that poor Ginger Rogers is a little old for her role. Another problem arises almost immediately when we realise just how flat and uninteresting this is going to be. Baker looses it as he has to become more two faced and Rogers doesn't stand a chance as she has to take on another lover. Only Herbert Lom stands a chance of saving the day and as things hot up towards the end it seems as if he might but then the story unravels and we don't care about anything at all.

Love is a Beautiful Stranger

[wilvram · 6/10 · 6 September 2020]

Quite a bit of effort was made to build this up as Ginger Rogers' first British Picture. Despite a good cast, and classy settings and photography - though it would have been better in colour - this melodrama never really grips as it should. Something seems awry with David Miller's direction, and as if to compensate for the lethargy of the first fifty minutes or so, the final scenes are a frenetic melange of chases, fights and rough and tumble. In fact the most memorable aspect is the song, Love is a Beautiful Stranger, rendered exquisitely by Lita Roza over the opening credits.

Rather turgid noir

[vert001 · 5/10 · 2 October 2017]

TWIST OF FATE is set on the French Riviera and could have been improved with color cinematography, but probably not by much. Its black and white images are not particularly striking and do little to enhance the film's Noir status. A businessman (Stanley Baker) is running a counterfeit operation not because he needs the money but simply because he's bored with big business. It doesn't seem very likely. He's also bored with his wife and is keeping a mistress (Ginger Rogers) in very high style. She, an ex-showgirl, is either naive enough or self-deceptive enough to think that he's going to divorce his wife to marry her. This would seem to be somewhat less unlikely. One of her old friends apparently has had a nervous breakdown and is in a hospital somewhere. This unseen woman's husband (Herbert Lom), a thoroughly lowdown weasel, coincidentally meets Rogers at a ritzy gambling casino despite the fact that he is broke. He also coincidentally is working indirectly as a part of Baker's counterfeiting ring. Baker eventually will mistake Lom for Rogers' lover. Lom may be mentally unbalanced himself right from the beginning of the movie; he certainly is by the end of it. When the necessity arises, Lom proves himself to be an excellent safe-cracker, which may be the most unlikely incident of the entire movie. If you're getting the idea that the plot of TWIST OF FATE is something less than airtight, you would be right. It would be rather churlish to suggest that the love affair between Ginger Rogers and Jacques Bergerac was unlikely given that they were married at the time. He was something like twenty years younger than she and moved on to another actress (Dorothy Malone, I think) after a few years. But movies, including this one, end long before that point is reached, and I suppose that it's just as well.

As for performances, Rogers had seen better days, and for that matter would see better days in the future not only on stage but even in her few remaining film roles. Here this normally lively and sparkling actress comes across as quite ordinary, and such a passive role as 'Johnnie' simply doesn't become her. Baker is rather stiff, and as for the performance of the handsome but difficult to understand Bergerac, I'll quote Ginger's character from the movie ROBERTA: "I've seen worse, darling, but not much."

By far the best thing in TWIST OF FATE is the performance of Herbert Lom. Despite the fact that his character is loaded down with absurdities and demonstrates no redeeming social values whatsoever, Lom makes him fascinating to watch in a 'How degraded can the poor fellow possibly be?' sort of manner. That and a snappy pace are the movie's two positive attributes. It's not a disaster, just a mediocrity.

Needs More Baker, Less Ginger & Frenchy

[TheFearmakers · 7/10 · 9 February 2022]

"I stole it... I am innocent," Herbert Lom says to Stanley Baker; one a gambling con artist and the other a rich businessman/secret criminal, both are connected to central star Ginger Rogers...

Baker's her supposedly single fiance and Lom a friend that bums money and steals jewelry, specifically a bracelet that ignites the alternate-titled TWIST OF FATE involving Rogers's real life husband/this film's love-interest Jacques Bergerac as not only a proud-poor artist but a different kind of Wrong Man, more a Mistaken Man...

This British production has a famous American (most do) and is set in Bergerac's territory of Cannes, so BEAUTIFUL STRANGER imitates the lavish melodramas from Hollywood's Golden Age...

Which is actually a shame since Baker, who would often play intense yet interesting, fleshed-out characters, whether bad or good, is somewhat one dimensional as the inevitable heavy, despite starting out romancing the hell out of Rogers before smacking her in the face....

Yet what the film's mostly known for is the pairing of Rogers and Bergerac, whose convenient romance includes flirtatious pottery-making (decades before GHOST) while the crime story, also including Baker's weaselly partner Eddie Byrne, gets secondary treatment...

And with future HELL DRIVERS Baker and Lom brimmed with raw, deceptive energy, BEAUTIFUL should have stretched beyond a marriage that wouldn't last the decade...

Yet it's still a neat 90-minute programmer, part noir but mostly soap, making this STRANGER a bit too shiny and clean.

A stinker but an educational one.

[max von meyerling · 4/10 · 26 July 2003]

British filmmakers faced what they thought was a problem. They spoke English (of a sort) which meant that they should be able to make some money in the US . This was necessary because UK returns weren't enough to make really big money. The problem, as they saw it then, was that they needed some star appeal for the Americans. Even going back to the twenties they would import American film star to headline the production and hope that people would go to the theaters expecting a first class Hollywood picture and buy a ticket before they found out it was a cheapo British movie by which time it would be too late.

Their big mistake is importing a 'star' with no box office appeal, or more, likely one who was over the hill, a bit passe, the news of which hadn't caught up in London. Of course it was the alternative that worked, (such as Ealing comedies) - unknown but superb actors in a well written and directed film was more successful and wound up with the unknown star going to Hollywood- e.g. James Mason, Maureen O'Hara, Richard Harris, Richard Burton ad. infinitum.

Along with the star it was common practice to import a director and a cameraman. Many of the best British cameramen of a generation started as assistants to some Hollywood 'old pro.' The British had an inferiority complex about their own directors.

For this film they imported Ginger Rogers and David Miller. Rogers was 40+ and her career was winding down. She made a picture with Fred Astaire THE BARKLEYS OF Broadway in '49 and MONKEY BUSINESS with Howard Hawks and Cary Grant in '52 but it was the co-star that everybody noticed and I don't mean the chimp (I.e. Marilyn Monroe). Miller was a superior hack, fully capable of rendering a good script like SATURDAY'S HERO but not able to save a turgid one like BACK STREET.

The script for BEAUTIFUL STRANGER (TWIST OF FATE) is a derivative rehash of what was mildly popular as a second feature a few years before. In other words - a noir. The dialogue seems to be the type where one expects an actor to turn to the camera and remark 'We're all in a movie, aren't we?' The real potential star of the picture, Stanley Baker, is miscast and badly used as the heavy of the piece, the fifteen year age difference between Rogers and him poorly covered up with grey streaks in his hair. Herbert Lom is a thief and a foreigner and crazy and doing none of them well. Jacques Bergerac was the nominal hero because he was the best looking etc. This was his film debut and was Ginger Rogers fourth husband at the time. Bosco, I believe, is the Italian word for wood and a piece of wood could have done a better acting job. I'm sure he must have had some other talents.

To make matters worse the film was shot on location on the French Riviera. Not a classic noir location. Once away from the Hollywood Studio system Miller seems unable to stage even the simplest fight or action sequence. Never has the Riviera looked duller (the film is shot without any inspiration or colour). I'm not too sure if it wasn't shot in Devon. A stinker but an educational one.

Ruthless people

[AlsExGal · 8/10 · 23 December 2012]

In fact, there are so many coincidences and misunderstandings in this movie it looks as though the makers of 1986's "Ruthless People" looked to this film for inspiration in writing that comedy.

Ginger Rogers plays Johnny Victor, an ex-showgirl who has become the mistress of Louis Galt (Stanley Baker). Everything she thinks she knows about him is wrong. She thinks he's been long legally separated from his wife and waiting on the divorce to become final - in fact he is estranged from his wife but very married. She thinks him to be head of a family business - he is, but it's his wife's family business, and any divorce would be the end of his executive life and the end of the front for his real business - counterfeiting illegal coins.

Now that's the straight-forward part of the film. The rest of it is one long string of coincidences and misunderstandings. First off, Johnny is friends with Emil (Herbert Lom) who is a con artist. She gives him money because she thinks the money is going to his sick wife. Emil is also working for Louis (several flights down in the chain) selling the counterfeit coins. Neither Louis nor Johnny know that the other one knows Emil. Emil owes Louis a bunch of money he can't pay back because he gambled it away, so he thinks he can get the money back by robbing Johnny's safe when she's away from home. He does so, and escapes detection by Johnny, but he takes something that was a personal gift from Louis. When Louis sees the bracelet up for hock and realizes Emil hocked it he thinks Johnny has a lover and it is Emil. Well, Johnny does have a new love, one she met after she found out Louis was permanently married, but he is an artist in the village, not Emil.

The end result is all of these people are arguing with each other yet none of them are on the same page. Emil is the only one who has most of the facts, and he's perfect as the cowardly little weasel. Somehow this not too bright piece of inhuman slime manages to steal even more loot, commit what seems to be the perfect murder, and frame unknowing suspects. One piece of advice here from years of watching Perry Mason - if you are ever in such a catbird seat, just walk away from the scene of the crime and act like you were never there - that's what people who want to appear innocent do. Do not follow the people you framed to see how it all turns out.

This is a European noir so there are certain techniques in style and acting that make it different from its American counterparts, but it is still an edge of the seat viewing experience. Only Ginger Rogers and maybe Herbert Lom will likely be familiar to American viewers. If those of you who recognize Lom know him only as Inspector Dreyfuss from the Pink Panther movies you'll find Lom's portrayal of the slowly emotionally unraveling Emil a revelation. Highly recommended.

Not much good noiresque

[timould · 4/10 · 4 October 2018]

This movie seems to be hampered by preserving Ginger Rogers' good girl image. This leads to a lot of highly unlikely scenarios, none of which ring true.

Conventional melodrama

[jaykay-10 · 21 July 2003]

This is worth watching for the fine, understated performances by Stanley Baker and Herbert Lom, each of whom exudes menace: a coiled snake and a desperate weakling respectively. The story strains credibility to achieve its effects and keep the plot moving, notwithstanding its reliance on the familiar trappings of melodrama - e.g., greed, betrayal, characters who are not what they seem to be. For a "kept woman," Ginger Rogers displays remarkable innocence. And is it actually possible to open the combination lock on a wall safe by merely turning the dial slowly and listening for clicks? The picture is minor-league Hitchcock (without Hitchcock), and it shows.

Dull thriller

[malcolmgsw · 4/10 · 7 November 2020]

This is one of those films where the longer it runs the less it holds your interest.Stanley Baker is the star on the way up and Ginger Rogers on the way down.Not worth watching.

Louis, Louis

[richardchatten · 2/10 · 3 September 2020]

Historically of interest as marking Herbert Lom probably at his least hirsute (it's even mentioned in the film) before shaving his head completely to play in 'The King and I' on the West End Stage in 1955. (Marianne Stone is also in it before she had her nose job.)

Ginger Rogers looks throughout as if she quickly realised she'd made as big an error of judgment coming to Britain to make this garrulous melodrama set in the South of France as her character has in getting romantically involved with dashing but vile Stanley Baker. However, she did have real-life newlywed Jacques Bergerac on the set to provide solace.