La scandaleuse

Beverly Michaels rolls in on the bus, finds a cheap room and gets a job pushing booze at Evelyn Scott's bar. She keeps her eyes for the easy touch -- creepy tailor Percy Helton is anxious to mend her clothes for her, and Miss Scott's husband, Richard Egan, is tired of dealing with with a wife who's drinking up all the profits, and anxious to trade her in on a blonde whose waist seems to be about half of her two other ample statistics.

Miss Michaels does everything except chew gum and stick it behind her ear to indicate the sort of woman she is, and is fascinating in a trashy way, just smart enough to know she's dumb, and to also know that men are not going to look at her face when she talks. Quite clearly her performance impressed the co-writer and director of this movie, Russell Rouse. They got married a couple of years later, had a couple of kids, and stayed married until his death.

Seen on TCM in the wee hours, this sordid little noir features the bleached blonde sexpot Beverly Michaels who had been dumped by cheesy Svengali Hugo Haas having switched his attentions to Cleo Moore. Bev makes Marilyn look like a goddess. As she saunters through the dismal sets which include a rancid rooming house, a barful of working-class mediocrities, and generic city streets, swaying her hips with a pokerface, you know this girl has hit bottom and is not likely to go much farther up because all she has is sex for brains. [A late scene shows her with a toothy, gummy grin which may answer the unasked question: why does she so rarely smile?] Down to her last dollar she gets a room, a barmaid job, a slimy admirer across the hall (the weird, weird Percy Helton) and proceeds to seduce the barman (Richard Egan had fallen this far in only a few years?), his bar-owning lush of a wife, and go for the money. The idea is of a continuing cycle of spider trapping fly in her web of deceit and avarice. When the fly is devoured, she moves on to another town. My question: after a few more low-grade films and a couple of TV appearances, what happened to Beverly Michaels? Can't be the same one who shows up 30 years later as a party girl in a British film, can it?

You can't judge a book by its cover, unless you don't care to remain oblivious to what the book might contain. The same holds true for low-budget films like Wicked Woman. Yes, a thread of superficiality runs through it, but if we judge this film as "trashy" as one reviewer here did, we risk comparing it unfairly with other films that were simply not in the same league. I prefer to judge this film based on what it actually gives us, not what it could give us. Such films don't measure up to the five-star flicks of Film Noir but they supply the mortar around which the bricks are laid. This film served/serves a purpose with its glimpse of seedy boarding room in small town America, showing us the transiency of the period. Once upon a time I, too, chose to "Go Greyhound" as a means to my adventurous ends, and I appreciated the tone established when Billie Nash she steps off that smokey bus that brought to this ubiquitous town from who knows where...and then again at the end when it takes her away again, perhaps to yet another thread-bare town?

Saw this 7/28/17 on a watchable version via YouTube. Not bad at all, does not try to push the budgetary limits. Rouse has a good script, and he keeps it moving. The leads, Beverly Michaels (a stick-limbed Mamie Van Doren), Richard Egan, Evelyn Scott, and Percy Helton all perform well. Scott, appearing as a boozy version of Rosemary DeCamp, gives a layered, believable performance as the wife of the Egan character. A larger than usual role for the reliably arachnoid Helton. The film hints, mercifully without showing, that Michaels yields to his sexual advances, a unique, unsettling milestone in a long career deserving of a Motion Picture Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement as a Homunculus. OK – maybe "Wicked Woman" does not strictly follow some "noir" rule book." But who cares about categories, other than just "movie"? And this is a pretty good one for the money! Seventy-seven minutes, and hard to find a second wasted.

This is one of those movies that is just a little film but somehow, I can't describe it, it works for me! I love it! I love the black and white, the really dated environment, that blonde hoochie mama, the storyline, etc. etc. Just a fun movie to watch and escape with because it's quite campy. I think the ladies will like it and I never saw that blonde actress before but I thought she played her part well the way she just used the men and had them all drooling over her. She had a great figure too.

I'm not a Richard Egan fan but that's okay, she makes it worth watching!