This looks great. The print is super clean. Money was clearly spent on renting good locations, and time spent on beautiful shot set-ups (cinematography by Joe MacDonald). But even with authentic noir trappings, it suffers by comparison with better examples. Fourth-billed protagonist (?) Mark Stevens has a terrific-looking angular noir face. Lucille Ball is sincere but just too lightweight; and her character is certainly not the typical noir female which would be fine except she's kind of a dumb, wide-eyed pest, like Nancy Drew. Her character pretty much cancels any sense of threat from whih the movie might have benefited.
You might go for this in the early reels, before the script has clumsily introduced too many characters, and then clumsily places them in boilerplate noir scenes that don't really add up to much, or generate much tension. It's like there was a secret order on the production to refer to, and rip off 'Out of the Past' & 'Laura' while switching milieus to the art world. It feels slightly better than the 3 Stooges doing a spoof of 'The Maltese Falcon,' but only by a little. And only because old hands like Clifton Webb (playing yet another runty snot) and Constance Collier are on hand to lend gravitas to the newbies. I haven't been too impressed by noirs where Webb is the heavy. He just doesn't impress me.
I might not have noticed the cut-rate script if certain pivotal moments weren't so poor. In one early scene, Bendix and Ball are at a diner after a car has run him down, and he says, "I have a police friend... I'll call him, he'll look into it... and then he'll call me back." Yes, that's typically how a labor-invoking request works. Say... you're a two-timing wife; do you really take time to kiss and canoodle with your lover in an art-vault while your husband is waiting outside 6 feet away to lock the room? The screenwriter grasps at how to construct these moments. I was laughing during the climactic shooting when a gal plugs her hubby and then tosses the empty gun at him, but throws it like a girl.
You might go for this in the early reels, before the script has clumsily introduced too many characters, and then clumsily places them in boilerplate noir scenes that don't really add up to much, or generate much tension. It's like there was a secret order on the production to refer to, and rip off 'Out of the Past' & 'Laura' while switching milieus to the art world. It feels slightly better than the 3 Stooges doing a spoof of 'The Maltese Falcon,' but only by a little. And only because old hands like Clifton Webb (playing yet another runty snot) and Constance Collier are on hand to lend gravitas to the newbies. I haven't been too impressed by noirs where Webb is the heavy. He just doesn't impress me.
I might not have noticed the cut-rate script if certain pivotal moments weren't so poor. In one early scene, Bendix and Ball are at a diner after a car has run him down, and he says, "I have a police friend... I'll call him, he'll look into it... and then he'll call me back." Yes, that's typically how a labor-invoking request works. Say... you're a two-timing wife; do you really take time to kiss and canoodle with your lover in an art-vault while your husband is waiting outside 6 feet away to lock the room? The screenwriter grasps at how to construct these moments. I was laughing during the climactic shooting when a gal plugs her hubby and then tosses the empty gun at him, but throws it like a girl.