Wicked Woman

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?

Wicked Woman doesn't waste any time getting started. Billie Nash (Beverly Michaels) blows into town, finds a room to rent, meets her creepy neighbor, takes a job serving drinks in a bar, and sets her sights on Matt Bannister (Richard Egan), the bar's owner and her key to money and Mexico. That's the basic set-up - the rest is a trashy, good time.

Wicked Woman is a perfect example of making an entertaining film with no money. Everything looks cheap, but it hardly matters. In fact, the cheap look only adds to the overall tone and tawdry feeling. Director Russell Rouse and screenwriter Clarence Greene really get a lot of the $1.95 budget they had to work with. Beverly Michaels is a revelation. Her Billie, with that super slo-mo sashay, is perfect as the titular Wicked Woman. She oozes cheap sensuality. And, you'd have little difficulty believing she'd easily do away with Bannister's wife if it meant she gets what she wants. The rest of the cast is just as good with Egan, Percy Helton, and Evelyn Scott all giving nice performances.

My biggest complaint with Wicked Woman is the film's ending. I really wanted to see everything blow-up spectacularly in Billie's face. Billie never really gets what she deserves. And the way Bannister's wife so easily forgives him doesn't ring true. Bannister should also have suffered more. Still, these are minor quibbles. In the end, Wicked Woman is a rock solid little trashy B-noir that I easily recommend.

This was a fun movie to watch. I saw it last week while attending the SF Film Noir Festival.

Beverly was a knockout of a woman. One of the rare tall actresses. The makers of the film probably had a hard time finding other tall people to act along with her. The popular character actor Percy Helton shows up again as a nagging wanna be friend to the stunning Beverly who uses him for her gain.

The festival tried to get her to attend from her place in Arizona but she said no. Her son the editor Christopher Rouse also tried unsuccessfully to get her to San Francisco. Oh well it was still a lot of fun.

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.