William Reid A great movie for those of you who still believe the "Mad Men" series was an exaggeration of the times (it wasn't) or if you have a fetish for redheads; otherwise, this 1956 detective pic is spoiled by 1950's sensibilities with it's clean, vibrant production and very white cast. It skirts around grittier issues but the story is more soap opera then film noir. The lead is a fixer of sorts (think 'Ray Donovan' but in a Botany 500 suit) and driven by his own selfish interests. Is he just a crook or an anti-hero worth rooting for? Two cleavage driven sisters (one good, one bad) help you decide. It's tricky and the acting is strong enough that you might want to sit through the whole thing to find out. But then again... The great Helen Hayes plays a house maid.

mark.waltz The garish pastel colors in this mostly unexciting political crime expose overtake all of the melodrama of the two red-headed sisters (Rhonda Fleming and Arlene Dahl) of differing personalities to make for a dull confection. The writer of "Double Indemnity", "Mildred Pierce" and "The Postman Always Rings Twice" (James Cain) wasn't as well represented on the screen here, and even with a promise of some delicious female bitchery, it is never delivered fully intact. We're supposed to believe that kleptomaniac Arlene Dahl is in her early 20's here, as a cop who follows her to sister Rhonda Fleming's house describes her to be from a description he got from a salesgirl who identified Dahl as the thief of some valuable pearls. She's already recently out of prison for similar crimes, and while it is obvious that she is mentally ill, she is never made to be an interesting psychotic case.Poor Rhonda Fleming, too; Her character is so one-dimensionally goody two-shoes that you forget about her Maureen O'Hara like looks which in earlier films had her delightfully hot-tempered and feisty. Most of her scenes have her fretting over younger sister Dahl and bemoaning the circumstances which got Arlene in trouble in the first place. Today, we'd just call her an enabler, but here, she just seems stupidly naive and used. John Payne is the ruthless politician whom Fleming works for and Dahl sets out to seduce. The only really exciting scene comes when Dahl and Payne are obviously heading for a rendezvous when a hit man all of a sudden corners them in Payne's enormous ocean hilltopped "cottage" after Dahl has pulled the trigger "accidently" on a fishing spear she found on his wall.The other real problem with the film is that it never sets its mood or where it wants to lay the conflict, with Dahl's "bad" sister (who is honestly just boring) or the political mayhem caused by Payne, his cohorts and many rivals. This makes the film sag throughout, and in spite of the colorful layout, it never really meets up with the melodramatic mood promised by its over-the-top musical score. This leads it to be one of the weaker "bad girl" movies made throughout the 50's, where at least a camp element would make it somewhat entertaining.

chaos-rampant Noir is by definition loopy; dead protagonists narrating from inside a pool, or showing up in a police station to report their own murder, the genre usually tangles its narratives in the steaming bedsheets of an emotional hotbed. We just writhe with them. In the best noirs, we writhe with them in the effort to disentangle ourselves from the cosmic strings that pull us.This is seriously loopy stuff, albeit awkwardly incompetent compared to the searing visions of Sunset Blvd. There is a protagonist who starts out a henchman of the evil kingpin, redeems himself, only to assume his place. Eventually he runs off like a scoundrel - he just isn't carrying this in any way.There is the convoluted plot about scheming and political intrigue in sunny California. Greed and ambition, the tropes. It's a far-fetched, dimestore thing, the kind of which James Ellroy would later simply obliterate as perversely glamorous background against senseless violence.Two things that strike some spark, one is the the two flaming redheads, sisters looking through sex for an entry into the world of money and standing. One is a kleptomaniac fresh out of prison, who wants to steal the other's man. They both sizzle in skimpy shorts and revealing dresses, sultry and dangerous like cutouts from the pages of a pinup comic.And there is the architecture that upends everything and nullifies it. Two houses, impossibly large and drowned in extravagant decoration. One of them is kept by a secretary, a really curious place to be sustained at a secretary's salary. But it's precisely this that is the movie's token, the candy-colored movie fantasy where everything is so simplistically possible and the small nuance of life is sacrificed for the sake of blistering outbursts. The wild colors, curtesy of famous DP John Alton, abet the artificial passions and overwrought cruelties.

secragt First, let's be straight: this is a deliriously entertaining, venal and vampy exercise in melodrama. It's a ridiculous movie with a nonsensical script, awesome crazy quilt radioactive light bright technicolor and at times laughably non-motivated behavior. But it's also a tongue-in-cheek anti-noir mini masterpiece crammed with over dramatized scene chewing and pleasingly unintentional laughs. The set designs feature some of the biggest house interiors ever (how does Rhonda Fleming afford that mansion on her secretarial salary??) Arlene Dahl is a deliciously cheesy home run as the sex object du jour and gives Martha "The Big Sleep" Vickers a run for her money in the slutty and criminally irredeemable little sister department. Everyone is working some angle here (particularly John Payne), which is both intriguing and finally just dizzying. Fleming, Dahl, Payne and Kent Taylor take a love triangle and turn it into a quadralateral with little trouble. This isn't the calculated and sleek Double Indemnity James M. Cain, but it sure has the smoulder and desperation of The Postman Always Ring Twice JMC.There's a political campaign thrown in and a big gangster (huffy and puffy Ted De Corsia) subplot for good measure, but this is ultimately a celebration of the campiest aspects of melodrama and what a party they throw! Definitely a date movie and highly entertaining for all the right reasons. If you can see it in the theatre, you may go blind from the glowingly phosphorescent crimson hues. "Slightly" Scarlet my ass!