That old saying 'they don't make 'um like this anymore' seems wonderfully applicable here, no distracting special effects or nonsense, this is all about story and delivery. Gary Merrill was a wonderful talent, I've seen plenty of his work, but here he is particularly good, in part because he spars throughout the film with Bette Davies. We all have our favourite Bette Davies film and performance, she is outstanding here, a striking woman, both in appearance and capability. She delivers her lines with meaning, reason and honesty, she is dark, believable, a true Femme Fatale.Barbara Murray and Anthony Steel make a wonderfully attractive young couple, they offer great support to the leading cast, as does Emlyn Williams (the interfering vet.)The film is loaded with intrigue, full of twists, and the plot itself is incredibly deep and intricate. You watch from start to finish not knowing which way it's going to go, and what the outcome will be. Crazy to realise it was made in 1951. The music on occasion seems at odds with the plot.A film of great quality.

The cleverness of a best-selling mystery writer gets her to see if she can get away with murder, but you know it's going to catch up with her. Bette Davis is the calculating American author, living in seclusion on the Moors and determined to let no man get in her way. It's very apparent that she loves her prized horse Fury more than any other man.The visit by a stranger (Gary Merrill) exposes at least one of her crimes as he is there to find her estranged husband whom she calmly tells him is lying in the other room....dead. Certain he will end up being made an accessory, Merrill arranges to get rid of the body for her, but when the local veterinarian (Emlyn Williams) keeps stopping by, Davis and Merrill pretend (reluctantly on Davis's part) to be husband and wife. The doctor had made a compound for the ailing Fury which taken in large doses can be fatal, and Davis pretends she used it all up, hanging on to it just in case she needs it again. She's in love with her secretary's fiancée, and even though it is apparent that she's obviously a decade older than him (at least), has managed to seduce him. As the game between Davis and Merrill gets more dangerous, each of them uses a one-upmanship on the other, but it is very apparent that nobody will be the winner in this deliciously wicked game.While Davis referred to herself as a character actress who happened to play leads, she hadn't really begun to play character parts at this point even though she was past the age where most leading players turn to character or supporting parts. She still has the Margo Channing/Tallulah hairstyle, and is even a bit portly, but it is obvious that she is still using her sexual wiles to keep the men in her life under her thumb. Like a female spider, she uses those desires to lure men to their doom, and even with much subtlety in her performance, it is obvious to the audience that she is quite deadly. Only on a few occasions does she allow those typically famous Bette Davis theatrics to take over her performance. She has met her devious match, however, in Merrill, and intellectual match in Williams. It's surprising that the writers did not have any of the characters playing chess together, because the plot is exactly like that, and when certain characters get "checked", you know that it will take only one move for them to get "mated".While certainly a fascinating melodrama (and Davis is always fascinating even in the most outlandish of stories), this suffers from too many implausibilities and even some tediously slow moving dialog scenes to be totally successful. But once it does get off the ground, it really becomes mesmerizing, and like a bad car accident, it is difficult to turn away from it. Davis's final moments on screen are fraught with tension as it becomes more and more obvious that her sins have obviously driven her mad. After having been so noble as her lover in "All About Eve", it's nice to see Merrill step up to the plate to toss her a curve ball. Anthony Steel and Barbara Murray's characters are nowhere nearly as interesting as Davis, Merrill and Williams', and as a result come off as rather bland.

Real life married couple Bette Davis and Gary Merrill went to the United Kingdom to do this feature film based on a play by Leslie Sands. Another Man's Poison had no run on Broadway so I had no cast in which to compare the movie cast with. I would dearly have loved to know who the original British cast was, that would prove interesting. With her clipped New England speech, Bette Davis like Katharine Hepburn had no trouble doing occasional English roles, Davis in fact did the best of them all, their good Queen Elizabeth on two occasions. Here she's something less than a Queen, she's a willful manipulator of people and events something I'm guessing she picked up in her profession as an Agatha Christie type mystery writer.Before the events of the film start we learn that Bette is estranged from her husband whom none of the villagers in the small hamlet in the United Kingdom have met. She says he's in Malaya growing rubber on a plantation, but in fact he's a bank robber and he came there looking for her to give him shelter and a hideout. Instead because she's got big eyes for Anthony Steel, the fiancé of her secretary Barbara Murray she kills her husband and hides the body.When to start the action in walks Gary Merrill her husband's accomplice in the robbery and also a wanted man. When the local veterinarian Emlyn Williams comes to call Merrill pretends he's long lost husband and Davis backs him up.Which starts a relationship of convenience for both Davis and Merrill both stuck with each other, but both needing each other to some degree. But with Bette manipulating to trap Steel at the same time the whole situation just simmers to a boil in the end.Best in the cast is Emlyn Williams. His veterinarian comes over like a country bumpkin, but he's really quite astute, almost like a rural English Columbo. Over here they would have the veterinarian the lead in a television series.Not top drawer Bette Davis, but in fact her bravura acting style carries this film over some rough patches. Another, a lesser actress might have not done as much with the material, but Bette Davis certainly could and did.

Okay, it's not an Oscar-winner, but this movie is a lot of fun, especially if you're a Bette Davis fan. The setting, a spooky, isolated British mansion, is strongly portrayed; by the end, you really feel like you've spent time some time within the oak-paneled walls. Bette looks just like she did in "All About Eve" -- same hairstyle and similar wardrobe, so it's easy to imagine that this could have been a Margo Channing movie. And of course her costar is Garry Merrill, with whom she also starred in "Eve." This was adapted from a stage play, so I think it's interesting to pay attention to the structure and limited changes of location, which are an indicator of its stage pedigree. This one shows up on TCM once in a while; sit back and enjoy.