Over-Exposed

In Over-Exposed, Cleo Moore makes an ascent from B-Girl to reigning photographer of café society that's as rapid as it is unpersuasive. She's a mid-1950s version of Blonde Ambition, or, as she puts it, `Where there's money, there's Lila – green becomes me.'

She wasn't always Lila, least of all not the night the clip joint she'd just started working for got raided. The alcoholic, has-been shutterbug (Raymond Greenleaf) who snaps her mug outside the police station takes pity on her by showing her the rudiments of his craft. She's a quick study and, more to the point, a shrewd operator, buttering up monied old janes with appeals to their deluded vanity.

Off to New York, she tries in vain to land a job as a photojournalist, though she befriends a young reporter (Richard Crenna). Instead, she opts for the glamor and easy money to be had as a `flash-girl' in a nightclub; on the side, she snaps compromising photos for a sleazy columnist (James O'Rear). Soon, she holds a concession at the poshest watering-hole in town, the Club Coco; the fact that it's mob-operated doesn't bother her, but it bothers straight-arrow Crenna, who's thinking of popping the question.

Invited to snap a birthday celebration at the club for grand dame Isobel Elsom, Moore inadvertently records the dowager's death throes as she slumps while displaying her newly acquired skills at the mambo. Moore decently destroys the photo, only to have O'Rear steal and publish the negative; closing ranks, her society clients drop her like a hot brick. Up against a wall, Moore decides to dabble in blackmail, using as bait another inadvertent picture – one that demolishes the alibi of one of club's mob backers, wanted for murder....

With elements of Shakedown and the soon-to-come Sweet Smell of Success, Over-Exposed stays a little too nice to rival them. It pulls back from any real nastiness and grit in its eagerness to keep the hard cookie Moore soft at the center (and insure smiles at the ending). Still, there are smirky glimpses into the world of parasites and lick-spittles who buzz around money, as well as welcome, old-school turns from Greenleaf and Elsom. Moore flashes solid credentials as a brassy schemer, while Crenna takes yet another step in the career that would stretch, chiefly through the magic of television, from Our Miss Brooks to The Rape of Richard Beck. Over-Exposed, diverting enough to watch, is quite under-developed.

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.

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.

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.