https://www.movieposter.com/poster/MPW-74557/Wicked_Woman.html
WICKED WOMAN, 1953
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Viewed at Seattle Film Noir Festival, July 2008. Lang's "Scarlett Street" with Joan Bennett and Edward G, which preceded this on the final day, is a thinking man's psychodrama but its inclusion in noir is open to question — which doesn't mean I didn't enjoy the hell out of it — however, to me it was only a warm-up for the main shot of the entire Seattle NOIR festival, "Wicked Woman", (United Artists, 1953, 77 supercharged minutes) which closed the whole week out in a blaze of a-moral blackness, with slim, towering, platinum-blonde bomb shell, Beverly Michaels (aptly described in the notes as "a stick of female Dynamite"), simply chewing up the scenery and everyone else in sight — male or female! This supreme noir actress makes Joan Bennett look like a girl scout by comparison. The minute she steps off that Greyhound in the opening scene we know we're in for trouble. When she checks into a ratty rooming house with strictly low-life denizens it already starts, fighting over the use of the bathroom, and especially with the runty bald creep across the hall, the inimitable fidgety, pudgy, balding slime-ball, Percy Helton. When she quickly saunters into a job as a barmaid it doesn't take her five minutes to vamp on the handsome bar owner (Richard Egan) and snare him in her web before the bleary eyes of his alcoholic wife. (Shades of "Postman always Rings Twice" in reverse). Soon she's got him talked into selling the place (and she'll have to pretend to be the wife and forge her signature to pull this off), ditching the wife and running off with her to Mexico.
"RUNT RUNT RUNT!!!
When Percy next door overhears her plotting and tries to blackmail her into having sex with him, she, towering over him by half a torso, disdainfully calls him a "runt", to which he indignantly retorts, "Don't you dare call me runt" — whereupon she literally explodes with the words; "RUNT, RUNT, RUNT !!!" — possibly the most egregious put-down ever seen on a silver screen. And the way she wipes her hand off on her nightgown after it has been greedily pawed by Percy is sheer noir genius. However, she does spend the night with him to shut him up talk about unscrupulous! Although nobody actually gets killed in this film, it feels as though everybody is getting killed all the time, and the tension in the lawyer's office signing the bill of sale for the bar is so thick you can cut it with a knife. Though posing as Egan's wife she isn't wearing a ring and we can see that, but the lawyer and buyer are so bowled over by her looks they fail to notice — Excellent direction here by Russell Rouse who also penned the bare bones perfect screenplay with one of Occam's razors.
The reason I call this "pure" noir is that it pulls absolutely no punches, has the perfect no-name cast, the perfectly compact scenario, the absolute absence of anything resembling any kind of morality, and performances so perfect it looks like the actors just walked in off the street and started making the story up as they went along. As for Beverly Michaels this is the Scarlett O'Hara of Noir. After seeing "Framed", in which Janis Carter so heartlessly drags Glen Ford down the drain, I nominated her for the all-time Best Actress Oscar of Noir Award. Now, after "Wicked Woman" I must respectfully ask Janis to move over to make some room for Beverly — as the best beyond-acting actress and the Wickedest Woman of All-Noir-time. Let's make that a "Lifetime Award" for Michaels as she is rumored to be still around, hiding out somewhere in Arizona. When she got back onto that Greyhound at the end of "Wicked Woman" with just enough cash to get halfway to nowhere on a one-way ticket, you just knew she would start vamping all over again the minute she got there. She actually starts right on the bus revealing a long well-turned leg to a scruffy salivating male passenger across the aisle
Too bad they didn't make any sequels; "Wicked Woman" II, "Wicked Woman III", or "Wicked Woman Rides Again" — What a waste of wickedness! — and Percy Helton gets the all-time Slimeball Award. Even though he oozes oil from every pore and rubs his hands together like a house-fly perched on a sugar cube, he does so with such practiced aplomb that you can't help loving him for trying every ploy in the book just to get into Beverly's hot pants once. Richard Egan was the letter-perfect noir leading man because, while handsome enough and virile enough to be an "A' movie lead, he was much too wooden and transparent an actor to make the "A' list — in films of this kind, however, with no high-art pretensions — made to order. "Wicked Woman" (along with DOA, 1950) is the letter-perfect film noir down to the last 't' -- the kind where the addition or subtraction of a single frame would lessen the impact. Numerous thumbs up! (Incidentally, WW is so obscure it even listed in MALTIN)
MY personal awards: FILM: Best Noir ever. ACTRESS: Michaels, Best cheap tramp vamp ever, SUPPORTING Actor: Percy Helton, sleaziest cheap slime-ball of all time.
WICKED WOMAN, 1953
image1.jpeg
Viewed at Seattle Film Noir Festival, July 2008. Lang's "Scarlett Street" with Joan Bennett and Edward G, which preceded this on the final day, is a thinking man's psychodrama but its inclusion in noir is open to question — which doesn't mean I didn't enjoy the hell out of it — however, to me it was only a warm-up for the main shot of the entire Seattle NOIR festival, "Wicked Woman", (United Artists, 1953, 77 supercharged minutes) which closed the whole week out in a blaze of a-moral blackness, with slim, towering, platinum-blonde bomb shell, Beverly Michaels (aptly described in the notes as "a stick of female Dynamite"), simply chewing up the scenery and everyone else in sight — male or female! This supreme noir actress makes Joan Bennett look like a girl scout by comparison. The minute she steps off that Greyhound in the opening scene we know we're in for trouble. When she checks into a ratty rooming house with strictly low-life denizens it already starts, fighting over the use of the bathroom, and especially with the runty bald creep across the hall, the inimitable fidgety, pudgy, balding slime-ball, Percy Helton. When she quickly saunters into a job as a barmaid it doesn't take her five minutes to vamp on the handsome bar owner (Richard Egan) and snare him in her web before the bleary eyes of his alcoholic wife. (Shades of "Postman always Rings Twice" in reverse). Soon she's got him talked into selling the place (and she'll have to pretend to be the wife and forge her signature to pull this off), ditching the wife and running off with her to Mexico.
"RUNT RUNT RUNT!!!
When Percy next door overhears her plotting and tries to blackmail her into having sex with him, she, towering over him by half a torso, disdainfully calls him a "runt", to which he indignantly retorts, "Don't you dare call me runt" — whereupon she literally explodes with the words; "RUNT, RUNT, RUNT !!!" — possibly the most egregious put-down ever seen on a silver screen. And the way she wipes her hand off on her nightgown after it has been greedily pawed by Percy is sheer noir genius. However, she does spend the night with him to shut him up talk about unscrupulous! Although nobody actually gets killed in this film, it feels as though everybody is getting killed all the time, and the tension in the lawyer's office signing the bill of sale for the bar is so thick you can cut it with a knife. Though posing as Egan's wife she isn't wearing a ring and we can see that, but the lawyer and buyer are so bowled over by her looks they fail to notice — Excellent direction here by Russell Rouse who also penned the bare bones perfect screenplay with one of Occam's razors.
The reason I call this "pure" noir is that it pulls absolutely no punches, has the perfect no-name cast, the perfectly compact scenario, the absolute absence of anything resembling any kind of morality, and performances so perfect it looks like the actors just walked in off the street and started making the story up as they went along. As for Beverly Michaels this is the Scarlett O'Hara of Noir. After seeing "Framed", in which Janis Carter so heartlessly drags Glen Ford down the drain, I nominated her for the all-time Best Actress Oscar of Noir Award. Now, after "Wicked Woman" I must respectfully ask Janis to move over to make some room for Beverly — as the best beyond-acting actress and the Wickedest Woman of All-Noir-time. Let's make that a "Lifetime Award" for Michaels as she is rumored to be still around, hiding out somewhere in Arizona. When she got back onto that Greyhound at the end of "Wicked Woman" with just enough cash to get halfway to nowhere on a one-way ticket, you just knew she would start vamping all over again the minute she got there. She actually starts right on the bus revealing a long well-turned leg to a scruffy salivating male passenger across the aisle
Too bad they didn't make any sequels; "Wicked Woman" II, "Wicked Woman III", or "Wicked Woman Rides Again" — What a waste of wickedness! — and Percy Helton gets the all-time Slimeball Award. Even though he oozes oil from every pore and rubs his hands together like a house-fly perched on a sugar cube, he does so with such practiced aplomb that you can't help loving him for trying every ploy in the book just to get into Beverly's hot pants once. Richard Egan was the letter-perfect noir leading man because, while handsome enough and virile enough to be an "A' movie lead, he was much too wooden and transparent an actor to make the "A' list — in films of this kind, however, with no high-art pretensions — made to order. "Wicked Woman" (along with DOA, 1950) is the letter-perfect film noir down to the last 't' -- the kind where the addition or subtraction of a single frame would lessen the impact. Numerous thumbs up! (Incidentally, WW is so obscure it even listed in MALTIN)
MY personal awards: FILM: Best Noir ever. ACTRESS: Michaels, Best cheap tramp vamp ever, SUPPORTING Actor: Percy Helton, sleaziest cheap slime-ball of all time.