Keeley Coleman The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

Ezmae Chang This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Geraldine The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Jenni Devyn Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

classicsoncall Robert Mitchum's character obviously didn't take his own advice noted in my summary line above. You can read that two different ways - he decided to be an involved bystander once Diane Tremayne (Jean Simmons) worked her seedy tentacles into his psyche. But on the flip side, even if he had remained the innocent bystander, he would have wound up getting entangled in Tremayne's demented scheme anyway.The thing that really puzzled this viewer was Frank Jessup (Mitchum) agreeing to marry Tremayne in her hospital bed on the advice of attorney Barrett (Leon Ames). The way Barrett framed it had to do with a sympathy angle the press would have taken to treat the murder of Catherine Tremayne (Barbara O'Neil) and her husband. Even for the early Fifties, I don't know if that ploy would have worked; today the National Enquirer would make mincemeat of the argument. Can you just imagine the headline? While watching, I was questioning whether or not it would be possible to rig a car to go in the opposite direction intended but the courtroom scene did a pretty good job of explaining things. Still, one has to envision Miss Tremayne crawling around under the vehicle to rig the throttle reactor spring and remove the cotter pin from the gear shaft assembly. That mental picture doesn't jive with Tremayne's demeanor for most of the story, so I guess one has to accept it on faith. Another element of that trial scene managed to bug me too - was there ever a time a juror could stand up during proceedings and begin asking questions? What this all boils down to, and I didn't see any other reviewer for the picture mention it, but to me, Diane Tremayne was as insane as her attorney intimated when she showed up to write out her confession following the acquittal. She took a perverse pleasure out of making the lives of others miserable while cooking up her own twisted form of revenge on Catherine because of the way the older woman treated Diane's father. Though the movie certainly qualifies for it's classification as film noir, it turns out that the femme fatale of the piece was actually a lunatic.

edwagreen As always, Robert Mitchum plays a slick guy who falls for the antics of a manipulative Jean Simmons, who has an angel face, but a very dark side to her. She never got over the fact that her beloved father, Herbert Marshall remarried and his new wife is Barbara O'Neil.Marshall and O'Neil were great thespians in their respective times, but in this film, their appearances are wasted. Their parts are poorly written and all we here is that the former has writer's block and the latter goes to her bridge games and is very wealthy.The ambulance driver Mitchum leaves his job and gal, Mona Freeman, to cavort with Simmons as the family chauffeur.Her plans to kill O'Neil go awry when the Marshall character goes with her in the car that Simmons has played with. Suspicion falls on Mitchum as he wants to set up a car shop and the two are charged in the murder. The jury must have been drinking cool-aid to find them guilty, even though Simmons had admitted that only she acted in the murders.The ending is right out of an Alfred Hitchcock mystery.

vincentlynch-moonoi I must dissent a bit here. While I don't think this is a bad film, to me there's just something not quite right about it.First off, about the cast. Robert Mitchum is very good here as the target of Jean Simmons' affections. Although, maybe this is what is bothering me. In the role, Mitchum's character is a pretty street-smart guy. Would he really fall for Simmons' scheming? Somehow I don't think so.Jean Simmons is interesting here. She's nuts, obsessing about killing her stepmother, but doesn't overplay the part...as is often done in this type of plot. In fact, it takes you awhile to see where she is going.The parents get a bum steer here in terms of the story. Despite being the target of Jean Simmon's hate, the mother (Diane Tremayne) gets little screen time. Likewise, the venerable Herbert Marshall (as father) gets little screen time, and has one good scene (coincidentally, I watched Marshall's appearance on "What's My Line?" after viewing this film (he appeared in 1954, and in one of his answers he alluded to having reached that point in life where he had become a character actor, rather than the star).Leon Ames, pretty much always a character actor, continues as that here as the defense attorney, although he is outdone by Jim Backus playing the prosecutor. The courtroom scenes here have been given high marks, and I tend to agree. Morgan Farley has an interesting little part as a juror.As to the story, it's a good one, although in spots -- particularly early on -- it hardly has the sophistication of Preminger's "Laura", "Stalag 17", or even "The River Of No Return". Worth watching, but it won't find its way onto my DVD shelf.

robert-temple-1 This is a rather tepid and disappointing film noir produced and directed by Otto Preminger. I believe the reason why it does not amount to much is that it was a Howard Hughes production. Presumably, he was obsessed by Jean Simmons at the time and just wanted to rush her into a 'vehicle' as part of his standard seduction process. More care was taken to get her breasts pointy than was taken over getting a decent script into shape: it needed several rewrites, but the breasts needed no more sharpening, that's for sure. As we all know, Hughes had a mammary fixation of megalomaniac proportions. At an earlier date, he had been so obsessed by Jane Russell's breasts that he personally designed a special cantilevered bra to make them protrude and point more. Here, Simmons was ordered to wear a sweater too small for her, which stretched over her breasts as tightly as cellophane covers meat in a supermarket, and beneath this she had been fitted with what can only be called a double pointer-mechanism of some kind. The result is two knife-like emanations from her chest. One suspects that if she had turned round too fast, she might have sliced Robert Mitchum in half. However, he is his usual rough and ready self, not taking her too seriously, ready to walk out on her at any time, and, well, being Mitchum. I thought I detected signs of boredom in Mitchum, as if he thought this film were a real drag. Getting pernickety notes from Howard Hughes every day must have driven a free spirit like Mitchum crazy, and he probably wanted to walk out on the production, not just on Simmons's crazy character. If anyone had taken the trouble to make the script work, this could possibly have been an effective noir. Ben Hecht was brought in to do something to pep it up, and he must have added some of the good lines such as Mitchum's hard-boiled line 'I've been slapped by plenty of gals before.' But spice in a bad dish does not necessarily save it. Too many reviewers are all excited just because Mitchum and Simmons are on screen, but that's not the issue. (I almost said that's not the points, but must get that image of Simmons's chest out of my mind, it's too disturbing.) Simmons is meant to play a girl of 19 (a part for which she was too old, as she was 23 and looked 25) who is mentally deranged. She does her best to do her 'spooky look', with the haunted eyes and the mad stare, the lingering over things ominously, and other tricks of the kind. But it is not enough. If she had been Meryl Streep this would have worked; after all, in THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN all Streep had to do was look at the camera in a certain way and we all knew what she was like from the very first scene. But Simmons was just a movie star, not a genius. So she needed more convincing scenes to get the idea across, and they had not been written for her. Preminger was not in top form, but he did one totally brilliant sequence towards the end of the film, where Simmons walks from room to room of the empty house, taking in the emptiness of each room one by one, in a kind of crescendo of despairing loneliness as she realizes that she is more alone than she ever imagined was possible. Each room makes her feel more alone than the last. This is all done without words, and Preminger takes a long time over it, not hesitating to eat up celluloid in order to get his effect, and it works spectacularly well. But this was something Preminger was able to do as a director without using the incompetent script, he just added it in on his own initiative. It was a master's touch, but not enough to save the film. At least Hughes did not make him cut the sequence, and it was left in the final cut. This film was such a lost opportunity, even though it contained so many clichés such as the demented girl playing sad music on a grand piano, the depressing mansion, the pompous rich stepmother (Barbara O'Neil), and the kept husband, stiffly played by Herbert Marshall, who has little to do so that his talents are wasted. One good job of acting is Mona Freeman as Mitchum's girl friend Mary. She plays such a typical fifties young woman, and there were so many, many thousands just like her at that time. She had been signed originally by Hughes, who must have cast her. She is apparently still alive aged 86, and good for her, though she last acted in 1972, so she must have gone straight. This film depends upon us being convinced that Simmons is not merely a 'crazy mixed-up kid' but a genuine psychotic killer. And that just doesn't come across, sorry.