George Saunders

(On Cable TV, February 2021) You can argue that Rage in Heaven is a film noir, but I see just as much kinship here with the domestic thriller subgenre of the 1940s, especially as a woman gets frightened by an increasingly unstable husband. But there’s more — a framing device that takes us to a French mental hospital, a subplot involving a family steel mill and a third act that’s all about a psychopath framing his romantic rival even in death. It’s a lot of stuff to fit in 85 minutes, and what holds the film together is more the casting than the plot. It’s tough to resist any 1940s film with Ingrid Bergman, and Rage in Heaven does pair her with a rather rare good-guy turn from George Saunders, while Robert Montgomery is a bit of an odd fit as an insanely jealous psychopath. The plot is lurid enough to be entertaining — but it’s not credible and that does harm the result. While Rage in Heaven is interesting enough, it’s a scattered film and one that probably should have been tightened up in production, or reworked entirely.