Skirball-Manning/RKO. Director Curtis Bernhardt; Producer Jack H. Skirball, Bruce Manning; Screenplay Bruce Manning, Curtis Bernhardt; Camera Leo Tover; Editor Harry Marker; Music Victor Young; Art Director Albert S. D'Agostino, Carroll Clark
Bette Davis
Barry Sullivan
Jane Cowl
Kent Taylor
Betty Lynn
Frances Dee
In exploring the topical subject of husband and wife, parents of two grown daughters, who find themselves on the marital rocks, Payment on Demand makes a point of avoiding the pitfalls of soap opera fiction in which emotional and physical crises are developed in rapid succession.
Bette Davis is in top form. Her interpretation of the overly ambitious wife, whose unscrupulousness leads to the marital collapse, has great believability. Part of the husband, who stuns Davis with the announcement he wants a divorce, is the sympathetic role, and Barry Sullivan handles it neatly and with a quiet dignity.
Adding color and flavor to the drama is the appearance of the late Jane Cowl, as the aging, pathetic divorcee struggling for happiness in a Port-au-Prince villa in company of a young artist protege.
(B&W) Extract of a review from 1951. Running time: 90 MIN.
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