Cry Wolf was one of three films in which Warner Brothers tried in the immediate post World War II years to vary Errol Flynn's screen image, the other two were Never Say Goodbye and Escape Me Never. None of them really succeeded and Flynn had mediocre results at best.In a biography of Barbara Stanwyck I read, the author tells us that Barbara felt Flynn had very little interest in the project, he gave a pedestrian performance. At the time he was very concerned with an oceanographic expedition his father was embarking on as a tax write off. Even then Errol's troubles with the IRS were getting started.Though Barbara Stanwyck is two years older than Flynn, he's cast as the uncle of a recently deceased husband of Stanwyck's. When she arrives, the family is somewhat jolted as no one knew of her marriage, not Flynn who is a research scientist nor did Jerome Cowan a United States Senator up for a big appointment. One who does welcome her is her sister-in-law Geraldine Brooks who was the sister of her late husband Richard Basehart.Cowan's not on the scene much, he leaves and it looks like he's leaving to give himself deniability as it would be spun today. Flynn carries himself with a sinister air about him and the sudden appearance of a woman claiming to be his nephew's wife has taken him aback. Flynn certainly does not like the questions Stanwyck is raising about her alleged husband's death.This was interesting casting for Errol Flynn and I think with some better material Flynn might have carried off the part. As it was by what I see and according to Stanwyck he lost interest in the project.Still fans of Flynn and Stanwyck might like to see the only film these two ever did together.

Just saw this last night for the first time. Must say that I loved Stanwyck running, leaping, jumping, being thrown by a horse, springing up again only to leap from an eight foot fence to the ground...This was clearly no stunt double. The gal was fleet of foot, and tenacious. She loved playing tough cookies, and that's what she served up here, a tough cookie who was really heroic and unafraid. She, as opposed to Flynn, does all the swashbuckling in this movie, and it's worth seeing just for that reason alone.And it was suspenseful...I was really quite frightened of what she would find in the lab, in the lodge, in the dumb waiter...what's that about the cold cream??? I was so edgy after she scaled the fence into the lodge compound and got lost, that I had to turn off the volume so as not to hear the scary music. So the score really REALLY adds to the suspense.I loved Errol Flynn in his early swashbucklers, and I really liked the character turns he took in Too Much Too Soon, and The Sun Also Rises and That Forsythe Woman. But here, he's just uneven..sometimes even blank, and then other times he's okay. Clearly the writers were trying to create a Max de Winter or Edward Rochester-type character ...is he good, or bad, sincere or lying? But the execution of the idea doesn't gel enough to satisfy.So, the writing's choppy and shallow (especially the last 2 lines of dialogue and resolution), and there's not a TON of chemistry between Flynn and Stanwyck. And yes, the other roles are either over, or under written, so you end up with shadows or stereotypes. But still, I found it fun, and there's no reason why NOT to watch this movie, unless Rebecca or Jane Eyre or Pat & Mike is playing on another channel.

I think it is generally acknowledged that Errol Flynn's best film work was in those films that combined his charm and his athletic abilities, be they swashbucklers, boxing films, or westerns. But as he got older Flynn was determined to prove his acting abilities. He could act when he was generally interested in the film he appeared in, but he was frequently willing to try to do a film that was unusual. This did not always work too well. He made such interesting failures as THE SISTERS with Bette Davis, where he was a newspaper reporter in turn of the century San Francisco, who had a wanderjahr that interfered with his marriage. The film wasn't bad, but his part was weak - the antithesis of the type he usually played so well. In the late 1940s to 1950 he tried three films to broaden his scope of acting: CRY WOLF, THAT FORSYTE WOMAN, and SILVER RIVER. Only the last one, a western where he played a man who was carried away by ambitious and greed so that he becomes relatively unsympathetic, was successful. THAT FORSYTE WOMAN (with Greer Garson and Walter Pigeon) was interesting (Flynn as Soames Forsythe was interesting casting, but he was too stiff - Eric Porter's memorable Soames in the first BBC version of the Galsworthy stories in the 1960s was far more human). CRY WOLF, the present film, was Flynn's only real attempt at the noir style of movie. As such it begins well, but collapses due to a poor script.Barbara Stanwyck has married Richard Basehart, the nephew of Flynn, before the movie began. Flynn, Basehart, Jerome Cowan, and Geraldine Brooks are the scions of a "Kennedy" style family, with money and political power (Cowan is a U.S. Senator). But Basehart has vanished, and Stanwyck, besides trying to prove her marriage, is determined to find her husband. And here she keeps running into Flynn's suspicious behavior. He seems very unsympathetic to her wishes, and quite cold most of the time. As for helping her locate Basehart, he keeps on throwing up roadblocks.The problem is that having set a good stage for a film which would have been confronting Stanwyck's heroine with Flynn's villain, the script fell apart. It turns out Flynn is interested in protecting the family's name and it's members from outside scrutiny. In particular Basehart and Brooks, who are somewhat strange. This change in the script was meant to enable Stanwick and Flynn to gradually fall in love and end up together, but it smashed the suspense that such a film should generate, and it ruined Flynn from having a potentially interesting negative part. Actually his performance in SILVER RIVER was far more consistent, and even his Soames retains the audience's lack of sympathy to the end. In CRY WOLF the audience gets confused - should we hiss Flynn or cheer him on? It would have been better all around if the screenplay writers had let us hiss him to the end.

I recently saw this one (unknowingly for the 2nd time). What were they thinking when they cranked this one out. True it has star quality with Stanwyck and Flynn, but what with the cartoonish supporting actors and very contrived ending which leaves you feeling cheated, it just never takes off. Further, the underlying "love story" is just totally unbelievable. True story: I am a big fan of Barbara Stanwyck and have made an effort to view her full catalog of movies. This one was so un-memorable, that I didn't realize I had seen it before until nearly half way through the movie. Obviously I had chosen to forget it soon after.