WICKED WOMAN (1953)

The opening theme song for this movie gives us some idea of the lay of the land in terms of how women will be viewed: "When the love that you're receiving / From her lips is so deceiving / How come her hands can mold you into clay?" Blonde totsy Beverly Michaels gets off the bus one day, sashays into town—catching the eye of weasely tailor Percy Helton—and gets a room in a cheap boarding house, with Percy as her across-the-hall neighbor. He tries to put the moves on her, but she prefers lying about decoratively in her room with the door open, reading a horoscope magazine and listening to her favorite record, "Acapulco Nights"—though she is perfectly happy to hit the guy up for dinner when she smells the steaks he's frying in his room. Bar manager Evelyn Scott gives her a job as a barmaid and she's very good with the (mostly middle-aged) male clientele. But soon Michaels comes on something fierce to Scott's beefy bartender husband (Richard Egan). He manages to resist for about five seconds, but soon they're sharing stolen moments and idly planning to go on the run, maybe to Acapulco. She suggests that Egan sell the bar, take the money, and leave with her, but this necessitates fooling Scott, a half-owner, into selling, which she has no plans to do. Michaels decides to pose as Egan's wife for the lawyers, forge a signature, and when the money comes through, skedaddle (Scott is an alcoholic and Michaels encourages her drinking habits to keep her off guard). But we all know about the best laid plans of mice and men—and this plan isn't particularly well-laid out.

[Spoilers ahead!] This showed up on TCM's Noir Alley, and though it has some film noir elements (the femme fatale, the horny adulterous hunk, the scheme to get money), it doesn’t really play out like one. Michaels and Egan (pictured) operate as a B-movie MacMurray and Stanwyck (Double Indemnity) or Turner and Garfield (The Postman Always Rings Twice), but despite the sexual tension and greed, it's a bit of a letdown when a murder plot fails to crop up, even though at one point, Michaels expressly wishes that Scott were dead. Basically, Helton messes things up when he overhears the two plotting and blackmails Michaels into getting some hanky-panky. In the middle that, Egan walks in, calls her a tramp and calls off the deal. We're not sure how Egan and Scott will reconcile, but Michaels leaves town like she came in, on a bus, aiming to snag another hapless man. The two leads are very good, with Michaels oozing sex (as a weapon) and Egan tied up in knots of lust. Helton, whose claim to fame in my eyes is as the drunk Santa in the beginning of MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET, is queasily right as the greasy blackmailer—at one point, Michaels calls him a runt and he warns her not to say that, to which she screams, "Runt, runt, runt!" There aren't really any likable people here—Egan's drunkard wife is, if not awful, at least unpleasant. An online critic at Cinema Sojourns notes that "the look and feel of the movie captures the lurid quality of trashy pulp fiction covers," and that is probably its best quality, even though it isn't able to deliver on that promise. Not quite a gem, but one to catch as it doesn't show up too often. [TCM]