The Man I Love

Walsh sends about a half-dozen plot lines, styles, and themes into the air and keeps them all whizzing along like a master plate spinner, but he makes it look effortless — you never feel the director straining for his effects, all seamlessly integrated into 96 smooth minutes.

Lupino’s flinty performance and Bennett’s haunted one infuse the movie’s pugnacity and violence with tender vulnerability, and Walsh, a cinematic poet of brassy urbanity, stokes the story’s volatile elements—artistic passions, high-society temptations, streetwise bravery, postwar trauma, family loyalty, and the secrets and lies that pass for romance—to a crescendo of abraded grandeur.

Typical tough '40s Walsh noir. [08 Aug 1997, p.M]

The dialogue is a mite pretentious at times, and the plot comes perilously close to soap at the end. But the performances are excellent, and Walsh's sympathetic direction, wonderfully flexible in negotiating the pin-ball effect as characters and problems interact, gives the whole thing the touching, kaleidoscopic flavour of a prototype Alan Rudolph movie.

Walsh’s directness gives the film an understated quality that may seem anachronistic today but has real cinematic integrity.

The Man I Love is both silly and depressing, not to mention dull.