When Sandra Marshall (Barbara Stanwyck) gets word that Jim, her husband of five months, has passed away, she does what any good wife would do and goes to see his family. But Sandra and Jim’s marriage wasn’t exactly conventional. Their marriage was a secret and they had an arrangement to stay married for six months so he could collect money from his trust fund. Sandra visits Jim’s scientist uncle Mark Caldwell (Errol Flynn), who is naturally surprised, yet skeptical, to hear his brother had a wife. But until her claims can be proven, she stays at the family home.
The more time Sandra spends with Jim’s family, the more strange behavior she sees. First of all, Jim’s funeral was closed casket, which is odd considering he allegedly died of pneumonia. When Sandra visit’s Jim’s room, she finds all his sport clothes and pipes are missing. Mark is also disturbingly controlling of Jim’s younger sister, Julie (Geraldine Brooks). He has the family’s servants constantly monitoring Julie, he reads her mail, and he refuses to let her leave the estate. Sandra and Julie quickly become friends and when Julie hears screams coming from Mark’s laboratory, Sandra goes with her to investigate. Although Mark later tries to dismiss Julie’s claims of hearing screams as nothing more than her imagination, Sandra heard the screams too and suspects it may have been Jim’s screams they heard.
For the most part, I liked Cry Wolf. I like movies that keep me guessing and Cry Wolf did just that. It also did a good job of not letting me quite pinpoint Mark’s motives up until the very end. But unfortunately, since I couldn’t fully figure out what type of person Mark was, it made it a little hard for me to be satisfied with the ending. However, I did enjoy seeing Errol Flynn in a role different from the usual swashbuckler/adventure type movies I”m used to seeing him in. He was good, as was Barbara Stanwyck. However, the script isn’t quite strong enough to elevate Cry Wolf from being a good movie to a great movie.
