Over-Exposed

Cleo Moore is front & center in this tawdry 1956 tale of the rise & fall of a model/photographer who gets involved in one grift too many. Moore has just been involved at a club's bust (she didn't know what kind of club she got a job at) & the cops have warned her to leave town but no sooner does she step towards a bus stop, a kindly photographer, played by Raymond Greenleaf, offers her a room for the night but being strapped for cash, when he offers to teach her the photography ropes, she obliges. Getting a gig at a prominent nightclub, Moore soon rises in the ranks gaining the attention of a gossip rag's reporter but also the movers & shakers in town. One night while taking a photo of a noted dowager, she catches in the background the club's silent partner, a gangster, who was implicated in a murder the same night so when the dowager dies later on the dancefloor during her birthday, the smut peddler hopes to publish the pic but when Moore resists, he steals & publishes the pic anyway. No amount of protestations about her innocence in the matter, Moore still becomes a persona non grata until she remembers the gangster's pic. Will she successfully blackmail the wanted man for a payout or die trying? Moore, never rising to the echelon of her fellow blonde contemporaries like Marilyn Monroe, Mamie Van Doren or Jayne Mansfield, nonetheless does the best she can by the material & comes away pretty much unscathed (all bluster & suspicion whenever offered a helping hand) but considering she never did get to work w/A list directors (or even B listers), she knew when to step away. Also starring future Colonel Trautman, Richard Crenna, as Moore's reporter beau.

Cleo Moore was more-less competition (via B films) for Marilyn Monroe. It is a shame that her career was short as she was a very good actress, but was saddled with innumerable low budget projects. She was long associated with indie producer Hugo Haas who generally cast her as a femme fatale in a series of "bad girl" films, which made a fortune, but did not elevate her career. The films eventually gained cult status, unfortunately, long after she left the screen. In OVER EXPOSED, and despite a slim budget, Moore is at her best playing a young blond with ambition. The film has a rather clever twist as she plays a photographer, but instead of posing in front of the camera ( in a bikini!), she works it as a business enterprise and, of course, there is a price to pay for that move as well. A neat little film noir that has been re-released via Columbia Pictures in a dvd box set, worth the price. Moore retired from films in the late 1950s and entered the real estate market, but to this day has a devout following. Some of her Hugo Haas productions have been re-issued on dvd, remastered prints, so keep watch.

Solid story with great performances from Moore and Crenna, but the finale was straight up 50s garbage!

Still worth watching.

It's really too bad Cleo Moore didn't make it bigger; she was very good.

I just sat through the better part of a day watching Cleo Moore movies and by far this one is my favorite. She was pretty good in "One Girl's Confession", she was OK in "Women's Prison" (she just didn't have enough to do) but here she really stretches her legs. She carries the whole thing all by herself and she does it with aplomb, like the veteran she was (this was her 23rd out of 25 movies). She plays a career woman driven by her shady past to rise to the top of her profession, photography. The only fly in the ointment was Richard Crenna whose character behaved like a spoiled child, his fragile male ego threatened by her success. The end was disappointing but right along the standards of the day. Still, this one's a keeper, even with Crenna in it.

Over-Exposed (1956)

"You'd use your grandmother's bones to pry open a cash register." That's the best line in "Over-Exposed," a surprisingly solid crime and ambition (and cheesecake) movie. But then, the second best line is when the leading bleach blonde model/photographer played by Cleo Moore has made it big, and she says, "Green becomes me."

This is a better movie than it could have been, with little known cast and crew and a story that seems at a glance to be a cross between formulaic gangster and splashy girl-photographer with some spunk. There is a love interest (a really nice guy who sees through our heroine's hard gloss to a decent kid inside) who comes and goes and seems to a lifeline to her salvation. But the real lure overall is success and money, which is found at a nightclub run by classy thugs. The movie remains a bit cheesy throughout, however, letting Lila be a club photographer wearing scant clothes, kind of like a cigarette girls did in those days.

One of the surprises was how central and accurate the photography was to the whole movie, start to finish, and I'm not talking cinematography, which was good, but the role of the photography in the plot, including shooting and developing and retouching. And blackmail, by the end. The friendly old man photographer at the start is a strong balance to the wayward and snippy young girl (Moore), and the two end up helping each other throughout.

So there is a lot going on, actually, and it's pretty well done in the main, with those occasional hiccups of a lower budget enterprise. Look for Constance Towers, who later made fame in a couple of hard hitting Sam Fuller movies (like "Naked Kiss"). Give this one a go. And know that the second half is more exciting than the first.