About Mrs. Leslie (1954)

“Mrs. Leslie” (Shirley Booth) spends a fair amount of her time helping out her lodgers at her Los Angeles home whilst benignly reminiscing about her own true love. That all started when she was a chanteuse in a bar and he an occasional visitor. The two immediately spark, and he invites her to spend six wintry weeks with him in warmer climes. Despite warnings from her boss that breaking her contract will see her blacklisted, she goes to spend her time with her mysterious stranger (Robert Ryan). Now he is no one-track minded user, and before long both are enamoured of the other and their six week dalliance becomes an annual occurrence. It’s only when she makes a visit to the cinema that she discovers his true identity, status and secret but will that kibosh her love for the man, or any love he may have for her? I though Booth and Ryan worked really quite engagingly here. Sure, there are some questionable morals but these two characters manage to illicit a sense of “so what”. Their memories are interspersed with the current romantic shenanigans of wide-boy “Lan” (Alex Nicol) and his girlfriend “Nadine” (Marjie Millar) which serves effectively as an antidote to her own, low-boil, lurid past. Robert Ryan was probably more famous for his grittier parts, but here he brings a complementary degree of humanity to the stoically savvy one from the on-form Booth. There is some good humour and even some angst in this (for the time) quiet daring observation of clandestine true love, and what’s more - there obviously isn’t a rose-tinted denouement, either.