Don’t forget the exclamation point.

Loretta Young‘s Ellen, in Cause for Alarm! (1951), finds out just how much harm another person’s paranoid insanity can bring to her. Her invalid husband, George (Barry Sullivan), thinks she and George’s doctor, Ranney, are plotting to kill him and he has Ellen mail a letter about it (little does she know) to the district attorney. After informing her of this, George unexpectedly dies of his ailment. Now the D.A. will think Ellen and Ranney are murderers! From that point on, the movie deals with panic and striving, with Ellen’s frenzied certainty she can’t rely on the D.A. for justice. (She can’t.) She must retrieve the false letter.

Most of the films of Tay Garnett I have yet to see, but he directed Alarm! as finely as he did The Stand-In and Love is News. He insists on clarity and works well with Young to make it her picture, because it’s Ellen picture. In my review of Love is News, I wrote that the comely Loretta “is not a natural for farce but, happily, is never false.” Here, she is a natural for suspenseful drama AND never false, so it’s a grand performance. Irving Bacon does nicely as a whiny postman, and the scenes with him and Young are very sturdy.

For The Virgin Suicides (1999), Sofia Coppola directed amiably, cleverly and fancifully, and I like her screenwriting (based on a novel by Jeffrey Eugenides) as well. Therein, five young sisters in the Lisbon family of Detroit, during the 1970s, commit suicide. The girls are ever in the thoughts of the teen boys who took them to a party, except for the perplexing Trip Fontaine (Josh Hartnett), who forsakes the prettiest Lisbon girl, Lux (Kirsten Dunst).

The film is about living with the unfathomable (such as the girls’ suicides). It is about—and it shows us—a free-floating rejection of important things: of life, Trip’s rejection of Lux, Mrs. Lisbon’s rejection of further schooling for her daughters. The characters behave this way because they see it as the only way to behave. There is no real alternative for them. Thus The Virgin Suicides is quietly gloomy, though with odd humor. It is a tenebrous seriocomic examination of human absence. It is limited as a personal film for Miss Coppola—limited in a way her Somewhere is not—but it is personal. . . Writing apropos of Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, critic Ross Douthat indicated that the lady’s movies are more notable when they “feature not just mild dissatisfactions, but the shadow of the guillotine.” The present film does just that, and more than the shadow.

Zulu (1964) is a powerful war movie and period piece, directed and co-written by Cy Endfield, in which soldiers of the British Empire fight to survive the onslaught of numerous Zulu warriors. The year is 1879. After the film’s first hour, there is a steady drumbeat of unusual conflict until the finish. Endfield is sympathetic mostly to the British because they are outnumbered—easily they could all die—and he is anything but unpatriotic. But he doesn’t withhold respect for the Zulus either, who can be honorable as well as brave. Stanley Baker, the film’s producer, stars as the dignified commanding officer. It is hard to get a handle on Michael Caine‘s character—Lt. Bromhead (though Caine exhibits his usual great talent)—but Zulu is energetic and cohesive nevertheless.

A girl rescued from awful parents living on “the Mountain,” Charity is raised by a lawyer, Mr. Royall, and his wife in the small New England town of North Dormer. She is secure there until, long after his wife’s death, lonesome Mr. Royall enters the teenaged Charity’s bedroom one night looking for intimacy. Charity demands that he leave, which he does, and thereafter she hates him. There is very little talk between them, but Charity does find a friend in smart Lucius Harney, presently falling in love with him. Their relationship, complete with copulation, goes well until somehow it doesn’t.

This is what is proffered in Edith Wharton‘s novel, Summer, from 1917. Written clearly and gracefully, in an apparently ageless style, the book is about people living in an almost dead (and provincial) sphere where they mightily hope for the love of someone of the opposite sex. I won’t reveal the ending but, truth to tell, there is a kind of compensation for Mr. Royall after Charity withholds all sympathy and forgiveness for him. Really, a sad charity emanates from sad Charity.