MartinHafer Despite Dorothy Lamour receiving star billing in "Manhandled", clearly the star of this one is Dan Duryea...a guy who really excelled at playing sleazy and malevolent characters. However, Lamour was a bigger stat at the time and Duryea mostly played strong supporting characters...so she got this billing. But for Lamour, there isn't much for her to do but be a victim...and hope that she isn't going to prison in this film.When the story begins, a psychiatrist is having his secretary (Lamour) transcribe a very disturbed patient (Alan Napier) and his twisted fantasy of killing his wife. Well, pretty soon after this, the wife is murdered...and the rest of the film about the cops finding out the culprit. Karl Benson (Duryea) seems to be doing his best to frame her for the murder....but why?? And can the real story come out by the thrilling finale?I loved a lot about this film but mostly what I loved was how gritty and nasty the film was...a great example of a noir classic. Duryea is at his best...so good you barely notice Sterling Hayden (a great noir actor)! See Duryea in the alleyway scene...where he plows a guy into a brick wall with his car! And, see Duryea slug Lamour's character...twice!! All in all, a nifty film...one that isn't particularly famous in the genre...but should be.

dougdoepke The shot of an ecstatic Duryea running down a terrified Vermilyea in the narrow, darkened alley way is a great slice of noir. Too bad the tension comes so late because, despite the promising title and noir icon Duryea, the narrative holds together about as well as an O J Simpson alibi. Looks like three different scriptwriters came up with three different results, so you may need a chart to track all the threads meandering through the plot. What the screenplay lacks is focus. There really is no central character holding developments together. Hayden's the headliner, yet his role as insurance investigator remains oddly inessential. Instead, lowly Art Smith gets the law-and-order screen time and in fact most of the movie time. Now, I like actor Smith as much as the next guy, especially in sly roles (Ride the Pink Horse {1947}); still, his comic relief here is not only misplaced, but too often sounds like it's being done by the numbers. (And whoever is it that thought a cop car without brakes is funny!)On a more positive note, Alan Napier gets a delicious turn as the snooty novelist husband, but unfortunately soon drops out of sight, and I'm really sorry Irene Hervey's sexy wife bites the dust early on. She's a lively and interesting presence, making her spats with Napier a movie high point. And that's another source of trouble. Everyone disappears from the narrative for significant periods, such that a nudge is sometimes needed to remember who they are, even the largely wasted Lamour. All this might be okay if the plot or direction generated some suspense, but they don't, at least in my little book. In fact, if it weren't for the great Duryea doing another of his patented oily operator roles, the movie would be much more forgettable than it already is. From the title, I certainly expected better.

bkoganbing One thing about Manhandled there are no shortage of suspects for the murder of Irene Hervey. About three quarters of the way through the murderer is revealed. It's what happens after that which gives Manhandled a rather unusual twist.What's really odd about the film is that other than being a leading man and someone for Dorothy Lamour to take an interest in, Sterling Hayden has very little to do with the solving of the case. Hayden plays an insurance investigator whose company sends him in to help the police solve the case and recover the stolen jewels. But usually in these films it's the private investigators who show up the slow witted cops. That's not what happens here, lead detective Art Smith is very much on the job, more so than the audience is lead to believe all through the film.I'm thinking that Paramount and Sterling Hayden were about to come to an unfriendly parting and Paramount did not want to exhibit Hayden in any kind of good light. He did two films before his war service and this was the third of three afterwards. Still Hayden did do well with what little to do he was given.Manhandled is made by the host of character actors in the film playing some interesting parts. There's Alan Napier, Hervery's husband who has been having recurring dreams about killing his wife. There's Harold Vermilyea the psychiatrist Napier was seeing about said dreams and who Dorothy Lamour works for. There's Dan Duryea who is a private detective who's been seeing Lamour. Finally there's Philip Reed who Hervey's been seeing on the side.So when Hervey is murdered the suspects are a plenty. I will say this that the actual culprit is someone who thinks fast on their feet. But it turns out the cops have not been as dumb as the culprit suspects.Paramount as a studio did not do much in the way of noir. But when they did do it, the results were pretty good like Manhandled.

jotix100 Alton Bennet, an unhappily married writer, is getting horrible nightmares about a crime he is about to commit. Bothered with his sleeplessness, he goes to get help from a psychiatrist. What he doesn't suspect is that he has engaged an unscrupulous professional who wants to capitalize on what he has learned during the sessions with the unsuspecting patient. Like confession, for catholics, there is a secret bond between patient and analyst that is sacred. Violating that trust proves to be the wrong thing to do, as one will learn later on.The action centers around a shady character, Karl Benson, who has an interest in acting up on what he learns from the psychiatrist's secretary whom he helped get a job with the conniving Dr. Redman. Both Benson and Redman are after the expensive jewels of the writer's wife. Benson is a scheming scum bag who will do everything possible to get to keep the loot, betraying, and implicating the woman who innocently tells him of what transpired in the office.Lewis Foster directed this seldom seen movie. Dan Duryea, who played a lot of seedy characters during his career, fares the best in the cast. A young Dorothy Lamour is seen as a woman who has fled her home and an abusive husband. Sterling Hayden appears as the representative of the insurance company. Art Smith is excellent as the detective in charge of the investigation."Manhandled" is a somewhat dated curiosity worth seeing because of the work of Dan Duryea.