mark.waltz Diana Dors is seen on death row telling her story of how her own greed lead to her downfall. She is married to wealthy vineyard owner Rod Steiger whom she met in a bar, but bored spending the day taking care of his elderly mother, she is soon involved in an affair with rodeo horseman Tom Tryon. She commits a murder which her husband is blamed for.I have seen several films with blonde bombshell Diana Dors, and I just don't get her appeal. She certainly isn't beautiful enough to rank up there with Marilyn Monroe or Jayne Mansfield; She's sort of a second-rate "Baby Doll" with a bit of a Gloria Grahame type pout thrown in and is truly unbelievable here as the vixenish wife. She has twice as much hair as Mansfield and Monroe combined, and a head too small which looks like a lion who needs his mane trimmed. She just looks ridiculous. In an attempt to soften his demeanor from early villain roles, Rod Steiger sensitizes his personality in an effort to move into a leading role. His character does have many different nuances-soft at times yet strong in his business dealings, but ultimately stupid for ending up with Dors. The usually lovely Beaulah Bondi, one of my favorite character actresses ever, plays a character that grates on the nerves. Had this been a better script with a better leading lady, it would have been genuinely chilling to see Bondi's fear grow during the spooky storm that ends up with a visit by death. In fact, had the film been in black and white and released during the height of the film noir era, it could have ranked a lot higher in ratings. But late RKO's color films looked somewhat washed out and were poorly photographed, so it is not too surprising that they were only a few films away from turning strictly into a TV studio.Marie Windsor, whose days as a film noir femme fatale were over, is wasted here as Dors' pal. I feel bad for Rod Steiger here; He really tries to do something with his character, but the script defeats him and he comes off as a small touch of class in an otherwise trashy story. This is a film that works better as a pulp fiction book with a colorful cover that leaves everything else to the imagination.

sol1218 ***SPOILERS*** In a very reserved and non method and overacting, that were used to seeing him back in the 1950's and 1960's, role Rod Steiger steals the movie, even though he's the star in it, as the sensitive tragic as well as guilt-ridden California wine baron Paul Hochen.We already see that Paul is up the creek with his wife Phyllis, Diana Dors, in prison clothes and her bleached blond hair a ruddy brown spilling her guts out to how she tried to frame him in the murder of his best friend and fellow wine grower Gino Verdugo, Joe DeSantis. As Phyllis tells her story the movie goes into flashback as we see the events that lead up to Gino's tragic death. It seemed that Phyllis was having an affair with bronco busting rodeo cowboy San Sanders, Tom Tyron, behind her husbands back. If that wasn't bad enough Phyllis planned to murder Paul and make it look like an accident in that he was mistaken for a prowler trying to break into the Hochen Mansion. Waiting for the right moment to pull off the "Perfect Crime" Phyllis saw that opportunity arise in a fight that Paul had with Gino at a wine grower convention over him selling his vineyards to an out of town and get rich quick shyster outfit. Despite making up with Gino in private all those that were at the convention saw was the slug, or better yet slapping, feast the two had in public. Knowing that Paul was to cut short his precipitation at the convention and go home Phyllis waited for him, with a revolver in hand, to show up and blow him away making it look like he was a prowler trying to break into the house! The thing that screwed up Pyllis' plan was that Gino coming to talk business over with Paul, not Paul, got there first and ended up being shot to death with Phyllis mistaking him for Paul!***SPOILERS*** With Phyllis faced with a possible murder charge Paul together with Phyllis concoct a plan where he'll take the rap in accidentally killing Gino where she can be free to look after her and Paul's 8 year old son, from a previous marriage, Michael, Gary Hunley, while he in awaiting trial spends the next few months behind bars. The one thing that Phyllis and her boyfriend San, who was in on her murderous plan, never anticipated, until it was too late was the sick and frail and not having long to live Momma Emma Hochen, Beulah Bondi, overheard the whole ghastly plan to murder her son Paul which put a wrench into it! That's if Momma Hochen lived long enough enough to tell to police about it! ***MAJOR SPOILER**** It was also Momma Hochen who knowing that her daughter-in-law Phyllis was totally rotten without a decent bone in her entire body that she took the institutive and did the unthinkable in getting her convicted of a crime that she didn't commit! That was to make up for Phyllis getting off Scot-free for a crime that she did!The very fine acting, especially by Rod Steiger, made up for the so-so script that at times seemed totally unbelievable. There's also the drop dead gorgeous British actress Diana Dors as Phyllis Hochen to look at when the movie got a bit confusing and hard to follow. And of course there's Arther Franz as Paul's older brother Father Steven Hochen who finally got Phyllis to fess up and take responsibly for what she did in her killing Gino while sent to the San Quentin gas chamber for a crime that she didn't commit. Yet ironically had everything to do with it having happened!

melvelvit-1 In this more-or-less re-hash of DOUBLE INDEMNITY, Diana Dors' Phyllis is a lot more sympathetic than Billy Wilder's femme fatale -which puts a very strange spin on things. As a wealthy California vineyard owner's wife, Dors sneaks off to the wine cellar to tryst with her rodeo stunt-rider lover (Tom Tryon) and decides to knock off her husband (Rod Steiger) but the plan backfires when she accidentally shoots his best friend (Gilbert Roland) instead. Things get convoluted rather quickly when a resourceful Diana sees an opportunity to frame Steiger for the crime. There's crosses and double-crosses galore with a satisfyingly ironic twist ending but what sets this film apart is the small scenes geared to humanize this murderess. In flashbacks we see that D.D. is a high-class call girl with a young son to support when Steiger inexplicably proposes to her. Later on, in prison, Rod confesses to his priest brother (Arthur Franz) that he never loved Di and only married her because a Korean War wound prevented him from ever having children so he saw an opportunity to take hers because he needed an heir for his Napa Valley dynasty. It's Steiger who's the real unholy "wife" -and not just because he's an adult male still living with his mom. A "war wound" could be interpreted as a repressed 1950's veiled reference to homosexuality. Once married, Phyllis tries to be a good wife and is tearfully thankful someone would overlook her sordid past to make a life for her and her son. But her husband soon develops a cool indifference and condescending attitude towards her and immediately puts the boy in a fancy boarding school. Because Steiger leaves her alone all the time in a brooding mansion with his invalid mother (Beulah Bondi), one isn't all that surprised she'd take a lover. For how many decades would she have to endure that? I realize there's a thing called divorce, and in no way do I condone what Diana did, but I can't help the sympathy I feel for her plight. It was her husband's initial treachery that made the whole sordid situation implode. Shockingly, in the end, the real unholy "wife" gets exactly what HE wanted: an heir to his vineyards with no wife in sight.Just before Dors is led to the gas chamber for her crimes, she confesses to her priest brother-in-law that, "Yes, Father, I'm truly sorry for what I've done." She's blessed, and if you're of a religious bent, you just know she'll stand before those pearly gates!Kind of campy (there's times you'll want to choke Steiger's mom), definitely over-wrought, and at times over-the-top, the tag line on posters for THE UNHOLY WIFE screamed: "HALF angel, HALF devil, she made him HALF a man! This is the wine cellar of the most respectable house in the valley. This is where she met them, made love to them, laughed with them at her husband ...the man who gave her a name, a home and a heritage...the man she wanted to destroy!" This lurid come-on doesn't quite ring true once you see the film. The Korean War (or his gaiety) made him that way, and it's what he did to HER that put the whole dark scenario in motion.Diana Dors, "England's answer to Marilyn Monroe", glows in the dark in this color-noir from RKO. Words can't describe the mind-boggling "Swingin' Dors" images on parade. With silver-platinum hair, diamond bracelet & dangling earrings -and a shiny silver skin-tight cocktail dress (very low-cut with rhinestone spaghetti straps) finished off with silver-sandal heels, she's a blinding heavy metal vision. Rod Steiger probably needed a can-opener to get her out of that ensemble.Added bonus: Marie Windsor's always a pleasure. She co-hooks with Dors in a tres bizarre nightclub and, lounging on bar-stools waiting to get picked up by dudes with lotsa dough, these ladies of the night are killer!****NOTE****What's up with the movie's title? It's gotta be an inside joke. What's strange is the fact that the sanctity of MARRIAGE and the CHURCH may be the only "unholy" things in this film. In the twist ending, the priest knows D.D. isn't guilty of murdering her mother-in-law, but allows her to be convicted and put to death anyway. Diana's marriage is nothing more than deceitful sham and (technically) the only thing the lady was guilty of was accidentally killing a man. She may have meant that bullet for Rod, but it didn't happen (voluntary manslaughter?). Either way it's an odd choice of role for RKO to give it's new sex-symbol star, the tawdry tale wasn't even entirely new to the public as it had already been a tele-play on live TV under it's original title, THE LADY AND THE PROWLER. The tale was obviously "ripped from the headlines", inspired by the notorious Woodward murder case that had recently rocked the nation after a Manhattan socialite used the cover of a neighborhood prowler lurking around their Long Island estate to kill her husband. Arlene Dahl's WICKED AS THEY COME also re-imagined that lethal scenario and the tawdry, glittery saga was eventually made into the TV movie THE TWO MRS. GRENVILLES with Ann-Margret playing the deadly ambitious former showgirl. Forgotten by nearly all, THE UNHOLY WIFE has at least one devoted fan!

bmacv Despite the BBC/PBS series Danger UXB, bombshells do not lie thick on the English soil. So, in the post-war years – the era of Jayne Mansfield and Mamie van Doren, of Brigitte Bardot and Anita Ekberg – Britain hastened to close the bombshell gap. Its most potent weapon was Diana Dors (née Diana Fluck). Sort of a bangers-and-mash Marilyn Monroe, with the same fulsome figure and cascade of molten-platinum hair, she was an inflatable doll who would soon blow up to Rubenesque proportions. She would become something of a joke, even to herself, as her self-mocking appearance in the Joan Crawford fright vehicle Berserk attests.But when we first see her, in a prison cell, in John Farrow's The Unholy Wife, her face is innocent of makeup and her mousy brown hair is raked back. Had she chosen to present herself less brassily, she might have been seen not so much as a sexpot but as an actress, and a surprisingly adept one at that. She plays the grass-widow wife of a long-gone pilot and lurks in bars cadging drinks from potential sugar-daddies (her workmate is Marie Windsor, in a stingy tease of a role). She meets and marries lonesome Rod Steiger, who runs a family vineyard in the California wine country (shades of The Most Happy Fella). But she's restless and sullen, left in the huge gingerbread mansion with her aging mother-in-law (Beulah Bondi) and her pre-existing young son while Steiger stays obsessed with his casks and bottles. On the side, she romances a hired hand (Tom Tryon). Her dissatisfactions turn murderous, and she hatches a scheme to shoot her husband on the pretext that she mistook him for a prowler. Alas, she kills his best friend instead, but comes up with a ploy by which Steiger will be convicted of the murder....The Unholy Wife is slow and moody rather than tense and agile; Lucien Ballard's color photography shows the dark, muted interiors that would later distinguish the Godfather movies. And typically, we lose track of Steiger's character under all the mannerisms he piles on top of it. But Dors, who starts out high-strung and abrasive, mellows down into a conflicted and even touching trophy wife maneuvered into homicide less out of greed or lust than by stifling boredom; she offers more dimensions than the black-hearted Jezebel demanded by the plot and throws it out of kilter. And at the end, the postman does indeed ring twice, which comes off less as a twist than a cheat. The Unholy Wife finds itself stranded midway between being a brooding marital drama and a suspense story, now meriting attention chiefly because of the underappreciated Dors.