Portrait d'une aventurière

This is an amazing film for its very dense direction bringing the best out of a rather cheap story and some totally unknown B-actors, Herbert Marshall being the only film star among them and playing the shabbiest role. Arlene Dahl in the lead reminds very much of Kim Novak in films like "Vertigo" , the same kind of superior beauty with something wrong about her, while Michael Goodliffe, somewhat reminding of Trevor Howard, stands for the passion that turns on the drama. Philip Carey as the male lead succeeds in makíng a very complicated part and character quite convincing and likeable, the one who saves some human dignity in a pit of human pitfalls.

It's as a psychological drama that the film is highly interesting, modern and timeless. Almost everyone sees that there is something wrong about Kathy in her cruel disdain of men while at the same time everyone must fall for her, but no one can understand what the trouble is, least of all herself, or if she does, she keeps a splendid poker face and never loses her control, although, as it proves, she is constantly walking on a razor's edge by an abyss. There are also parallels to Polanski's "Repulsion", it's a related case, but here you get the full story, although not until the end. You are left hanging in the end with everything lost but hope, which is no more than a faint light that no one can know if it will survive.

Ken Hughes later made other excellent films, especially "The Trials of Oscar Wilde", and this is no less impressing in its extremely smooth psychological direction where nothing is out of the context, like a perfect jig-saw puzzle with no pieces missing and all fitting perfectly.

Arlene Dahl is "Wicked as They Come" in this 1956 film also starring Philip Carey. Soap fans may know Carey as Asa Buchanan in "One Life to Live," the soap opera from which the 82-year-old actor recently retired, having been diagnosed with lung cancer in 2006. In 1956, he was as hunky as they get. Herbert Marshall also stars.

A Hollywood insider once told me that the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in person - and he had seen them all - was Arlene Dahl. So she's a great choice to play a man-hating, gold-digging femme fatale in this British drama. Her character, Kathy, suffered some sort of trauma which has caused her to turn on men. To her, they're just steppingstones to big bucks. One man (Carey) sees through her and acts as her conscience throughout the film.

If this film had been a lot worse or a lot better, it could today be a camp classic. Unfortunately it falls in between. Kathy pulls some outrageous stunts, but the script doesn't have enough bite to it. Not only that, it's entirely predictable. Case in point is Kathy's romance with her boss, Stephen (Herbert Marshall). He agrees to leave his wife for her. Later that evening, Kathy realizes that Stephen's wife is no less than the daughter of the owner of the company. Leaving her will certainly put Stephen out of a job. When Stephen's wife confronts Kathy in the ladies' room, you had to know she'd be calling Kathy "Stepmommy" pretty soon, now that Kathy knows the score and the players. That's hardly my favorite Kathy moment - the best is when she becomes engaged and practically buys out a store on the guy's charge account, then pawns everything and blows town. That took guts.

Dahl, despite her beauty, was never really given a chance to show what she could do in Hollywood acting-wise, and here, she's good. Had she been around at the height of Hollywood's golden age, she perhaps would have had more opportunities. As a post-war actress with the studios on the verge of breaking up, she really didn't, and while another redhead, Rhonda Fleming, had a slightly better career, neither achieved the stardom they might have.

Recommended for beautiful Arlene, handsome Phil, a pretty old Herbert Marshall and some beautiful fashions.

Wicked as they come is the suggestive title of this 1956 British drama, with Arlene Dahl as the protagonist. It is the story of a beautiful woman, who reveals symptoms of misandry from an early age, but ruthlessly uses men as means of social and financial advancement.

The film portrays this life path, with a refusal of emotional involvement, which accumulates enemies and seems destined for a tragic end.

It's an interesting, original, well-paced film, a little melodramatic for some people's tastes, but one that can be enjoyed until the end, as a result of the plot's ongoing developments.

With Philip Carey, Michael Goodliffe and veteran Herbert Marshall, among the actors who embody the suitors passed over by the Machiavellian Kathy.

Fab 50s fashions are the best thing this film has to offer with its story of a woman who works at some shirtwaist dress company who manipulates her way out of the "hoodlum" infested neighborhood in NY she comes from, claiming to be from tonier Boston! Sadly it seems they ran out of a costume budget halfway through, when, in spite of having hooked her biggest fish yet, she starts wearing outfits over again (such as a hideous white stole) - outfits less stylish, strangely, now that she lives in Paris!

The locations/sets are to die for. As is Arlene Dahl - gorgeous - but I kind of find her even more remarkable later in her life on the game show circuit. That's some long lasting glamour she's got! Besides as a young gal she looked too much like Janet Leigh. She married some hotties in her time and offsprang some too. Wow. Lex Barker, Lorenzo Lamas. Mmmm mmm! Not too shabby, tabby!

The film was introduced by a historian reading excerpts from a transcript of a suit brought by AD against the studio over a composite photo made for publicity purposes for which she maintained she never posed (and it certainly isn't in the film) in which someone kisses her nude shoulder. She insisted it was a "wanton" image, while maintaining she was "no prude". The court however found the image "delicate and artistic" or some such... she lost the case. All the same she says this is one of her favorite vehiculars. Well, I haven't seen any of her others but either they were pretty bad or her taste in hotties is better than her taste in pictures!

Anyway, the mitigating finale of the film is kind of a disappointment, as is the general low level of her wickedness throughout. Sure, she's "cheap and horrible" as Mildred Pierce said of Veda, but the whole story is told in more amusing pointed and flat out woman hatingly in some of those Hollywood precode films like "Babyface" with Babs Stanwyck (who never married any hotties). "Wicked" pulling its punches didn't really add much to it. Girl, if this is "wicked as they come" then I guess there are no whores, only (violated and somewhat narcissistic) madonnas!

This priceless British copy of an American crime film comes to you courtesy of rising young director Ken Hughes with a tongue-in-cheek tone set from the outset by shots of fifties London accompanied by a noisy jazz score provided by Malcolm Arnold, with noirish photography by Basil Emmott.

Set in the days when travel by plane was considered the high of glamour, the presence of Sid James as Arlene Dahl's stepfather serves as a visual reminder of Miss Dahl's humble beginnings (early on she's seen wielding a broken bottle) before she rises in the world while wreaking havoc on all the men in the cast,