The Scarlet Hour

E.V. "Marsh" Marshall (Tom Tryon) is an up-and-coming sales manager for the Ralph Nevin (James Gregory) real estate empire but little does Ralph know that his top employee is having an affair with his slinky wife "Paulie" (Carol Ohmart). Parked in a lover's lane one night, Marsh and Paulie overhear plans for a quarter million dollar jewel heist and high tail it out of there but it does plant a seed. Paulie's husband beats her and she wants out but she came from the tenements and doesn't want to go back so she begs Marsh to help her break free by ripping off the jewel robbers...

There's twists and turns galore in Michael Curtiz' suspense-filled '50s noir that for some reason remains unsung. This was no B-movie, either; it's a Paramount film in VistaVison produced and directed by an Academy Award winner with a sure hand for this sort of thing from a story by Frank Tashlin, of all people. The film "introduces" Tom Tryon, Carol Ohmart, and Jody Lawrance and although none of them went on to major stardom, Tom and Carol had respectable second tier careers. Ohmart was a very sexy lady with the kind of cruel beauty that lent itself well to femme fatale roles and handsome Tom conveys "conflicted" convincingly. Elaine Stritch (her feature film debut, as well) adds heart as Paulie's floozy friend from the old days before she married well and E.G. Marshall's on hand as the investigating police detective. Nat King Cole croons "Never Let Me Go" in the Crystal Room of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Recommended.

Tom Tryon stars with Carol Ohmart, Elaine Stritch, James Gregory, Jody Lawrence, Edward Lewis, and E. G. Marshall in "The Scarlet Hour," a 1956 film directed by Michael Curtiz.

Tryon plays Marsh (E. V. Marshall even though E. G. Marshall is in the movie) a hunky employee of a real estate firm who is having an affair with the boss' wife Pauline (Ohmart). One night, while parking in a secluded spot, they overhear a man (Lewis) plotting the robbery of $320,000 worth of jewels from a nearby house.

Pauline sees this as a way to leave her husband Ralph Nevins (Gregory) - she wants Marsh to do the robbery and steal the jewels from the criminals. Then they can go away together.

Things don't go as planned. First, Marsh is totally against doing it. Then he decides he will. Meanwhile, Nevins is suspicious of both of them. Pauline has given herself an alibi as she is out with friends -- but Nevins, in a rented car, follows her from the club.

Marsh gets the jewels but the robbers shoot at him as he escapes. Pauline, meanwhile, has tangled with her husband, who winds up dead from a gunshot wound, supposedly from the robbers' crossfire. In the fight with Nevins, Pauline drops a bracelet her husband had designed for her.

It all becomes a tangled mess with suspicion for the murder falling on Marsh, Pauline, and even Nevins' secretary Kathy (Jody Lawrence). And Pauline, alone in her big house, becomes desperate.

Good movie with beautiful singing by Nat King Cole performing "Never Let Me Go," and Broadway star Elaine Stritch early in her career as a friend of Pauline's.

Three small points - Billy Gray is listed in the film, but I didn't see him; and I swear that the cops were talking about Pauline's bracelet at one point, although it was the crooks who picked it up - I could be wrong.

The third thing only a few will notice. When Marsh walks into the boss' office, Kathy is transcribing from a reel to reel tape to her typewriter. Gregory, on tape, was speaking at a normal speed. You cannot transcribe what a person says as they talk without a foot pedal to stop and catch up, the ability to slow down the tape, or if the person is speaking slower than normal. I can attest to that having spent 40 years transcribing and typing well over 100 words a minute. It's a pet peeve of mine, as is recording someone and putting the recorder on the other side of the room or in your purse.

Ohmart was "introduced" in this film. She was a sultry blonde with a beautiful figure and a sexy voice. She worked until she retired in the '70s.

The handsome Tryon had a decent career in films but wound up a highly successful author. Jody Lawrence had a spotty career. Of interest, her stepmother took in a foster child, Norma Jean Baker (Marilyn Monroe) and Lawrence and Monroe actually roomed together briefly.

Well worth seeing, not up there with the great Curtiz films but certainly very good.

Michael Curtiz had quite a few successes in his directorial career: Casablanca, Adventures of Robin Hood, Sea Wolf, Captain Blood, Mildred Pierce, Night and Day all are so well known that they obscure to some extent a true gem like THE SCARLET HOUR.

David Niven famously quoted Curtiz's order on the set as the title to his first autobiographical book: "Bring on the empty horses!" By which he meant the riderless horses. There is nothing empty about THE SCARLET HOUR. It opens with infidelity by a married woman, causing the couple to hear someone's plans to steal $350,000 from a house in Baja California, and it ends suitably openly.

I admire Curtiz's courage in going ahead with this project despite the unknown leads. In fact, the female lead, Carol Ohmart, debuts as Pauline in THE SCARLET HOUR. She is a dish, too (the camera lovingly films her curvaceous figure and long legs) and she certainly has no hangups about cheating on her rich hubby - accomplished performance from James Gregory - corrupting her standup lover, and seeking revenge on the secretary, Kathy, who catches lover Marsh's eye with her honesty and unambiguous love.

Marsh, played convincingly by Tom Tryon - also debuting, though that is not mentioned in the credits - is a well-meaning fellow who wants to do the right thing but is blinded by his love for the gorgeous Pauline. To complicate matters, Pauline decides that $350,000 is exactly what they need to elope and have a good life elsewhere on the planet. Unbeknown to the lovebirds, hubby Gregory suspects something and gets himself in the line of fire, whereupon police duo E. G. Marshall and Edward Binns arrives on the scene with a bang, almost stealing the show with their sharp inquisitiveness.

As Marsh puts it, Kathy is the sole clean character in this remarkably crisp and logical script, further buoyed by extremely competent cinematography from Lionel Lindon, and Curtiz's exacting and intelligent direction.

I recommend THE SCARLET HOUR to anyone interested in film noir.

This is a superb film noir directed by Michael Curtiz, which has never been officially reissued in video or DVD format. The film introduces three new lead players, Carol Ohmart, Ton Tryon, and Elaine Stritch, who here all appear in their first feature film. This was clearly a conscious decision by Paramount to try and create new stars. They took an excellent script and entrusted the project to the capable hands of Oscar-winner Michael Curtiz, who is of course most famous for directing CASABLANCA (1942). Carol Ohmart is the femme fatale. She has a low dusky voice and moves, speaks and acts like Barbara Stanwyck. Stanwyck was twenty years older than Ohmart, and perhaps it seemed time to try and reinvent her. Ohmart does an excellent job and there is nothing to complain of about her performance except for one thing, and that is that she did not possess the natural magic of a true star. In this film she is highly effective, but we are not entranced. What is there that makes one woman spellbinding and another not? We will never know the answer. Young Tom Tryon as the earnest, love-crazed male lead is very good, though at that age he looked a bit weird, and he was much more effective and better looking when he was older and had developed a bit of gravitas, as for instance in THE CARDINAL (1963). Elaine Stritch is given a substantial supporting role, and she makes the most of it, stealing plenty of scenes (though apparently without meaning to do so) and showing what stuff she is made of, as the decades which followed have proved. Michael Curtiz does his usual excellent job of directing, and the story really does have some surprises and twists. This is no B picture, it is the real thing. Ohmart is a gold-digger who has married a rich older man (played by James Gregory) for whom she has no affection whatever. But then, her affection is reserved for herself. She does however have a mad passion for Tryon, and must have him. 'I want you,' she says to him repeatedly, like a Roman Empress deciding to conquer Cilicia before the week is out. They can't keep their hands off each other, and their mouths are glued together and they simply can't tell whose arms are which. A slight problem! Tryon works for the husband. Also, the boss's secretary, played with doe-eyed devotion by Jody Lawrance (who retired from acting only 12 years later at the age of 38, and died aged only 55 in 1986), is hopelessly in love with Tryon, who does not notice. This film is notable for an appearance by the singer Nat King Cole, who sings an entire song, 'Never Let Me Go' (composed specially for this film), standing and smiling in a nightclub into which Ohmart briefly goes before slipping out on one of her sinister errands of passion. The film begins with Ohmart and Tryon sitting in an open convertible on a warm summer night on the hills overlooking the lights of Los Angeles. They have been necking passionately and suddenly two other cars drive up nearby, which do not see them. Men get out of each car and a rendezvous takes place, in which a jewel robbery is planned, and the couple overhear all the details. Who is the mysterious and genteel man who is organising it? Later in the film we get a real shock when we find out who he is. (No, it is not Ohmart's husband. Try again. Give up, you could never guess.) Ohmart wants to run away with Tryon, who 'has no money' (at least not enough for her), so she browbeats him into robbing the robbers and taking the $350,000 worth of jewels from them as 'running away money'. When Tryon protests, Ohmart ruthlessly scorns his comparative poverty, and says 'I've been poor before.' But of course, this being a film noir, things go terribly wrong. And go on going wrong. And go on going even more wrong. And everything becomes impossibly tense, so that sweat practically breaks out upon the celluloid itself. And then more surprises come, and yet more tension. The screenwriter has no mercy on us. And Ohmart is relentless, as greedy and passionate as Stanwyck in DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944), a role on which she clearly modelled her own performance. This really is a good one. I would say don't miss it, but first you have to find it, and that is even more difficult than solving the plot. Type it into Google with the word 'buy'.

The Scarlet Hour is directed by Micahel Curtiz and written by Rip Van Ronkel, Frank Tashlin and John Lucas. It stars Carol Ohmart, Tom Tryon, E.G. Marshall, Elaine Stritch, Jody Lawrance and James Gregory. Music is by Leith Stevens and cinematography by Lionel Lindon.

It has been a hard to locate film noir for may a year, which when you consider it's directed by such a titan of classic cinema comes as a surprise. The plot dynamics are very familiar to noir fans, and coming as it does late in the original film noir wave it does lack a bit of freshness, but there's little deviations in the shenanigans of the principals to at least give this its own identity.

We essentially have an abused wife (Ohmart) having an affair with one of her husbands (Gregory) employees (Tryon). They plan to run away together but need money to do so. As it happens, during one of their love sessions in a parked car they over hear crooks planning a jewelry robbery and she convinces her man to hold up the thieves so as to take the jewels for themselves. In true noirville form this becomes a road to nowhere and danger lurks on every corner, with dodgy alibis, unrequited passions and a few twists and turns to keep the narrative perky.

This is no shoddy production either, it comes out of Paramount and the presence of Curtiz shows you that the studio wasn't merely making a contract filler. Though the absence of chirascuro from Lindon is a shame, we do get some nifty sequences such as violence enacted that we only see via shadows. There's moments of humour as well, while there's also a musical surprise as Nat King Cole turns up to croon Never Let Me Go. Cast are fine, Ohmart has classic fatale looks and legs from heaven, but her character trajectory is a little muddled in the writing. Tryon plays the dupe competently, Lawrance sparkles in a secondary role, as does the scene stealing Stritch.

I'd stop at calling this a hidden gem, as some other amateur reviewers have, though it does rather depend on how many other similar noirs you have seen previously. This doesn't come close to Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice or Thérèse Raquin, but that doesn't stop it being a good film, because it is and for sure it's well worth noir fans tracking it down. 7/10