The Other Woman

Hugo Haas made films that were quite different from what was normally made in Hollywood, the women were often uncompromisingly mean or at least unpleasant and there was usually no happy ending.

I must admit that i often like that in his films , ik makes the female characters much more realistic .

This film is not much different, Cleo Moore plays her nasty role very well, maybe with some overacting but still good, Hugo Haas once again plays himself in his own film, the man is far from being a top actor but it is enough.

It is a shame that these films have always been stuck in the B segment, because there was potential in this story.

Even when he doesn't fall for the dame auteur Hugo Haas manages to get undone by the duplicitous species. In The Other Woman, Haas introduces Cleo Moore who would become in-house fatale to his pathetic doormat characters for half a dozen pictures with similar outcomes.

Director Walter Darman (Haas) is pressed for a minor replacement for his picture and chooses an extra (Moore) who quickly flubs her chance with a couple of lines. Humiliated she swears vengeance and concocts a story that would destroy his marriage and career. He overreacts and things quickly spiral out of control.

Hell's fury and then some, scorned Cleo pulls out all the stops to even the score with Darman whose drinking and thinking play co-culprit to banshee Moore's plotting. What she wasn't expecting is Darman's over reaction.

Moore is an unrepentant creep, hard to sympathize with beyond her cringeworthy screen test. Haas is his usual slow on the uptake self before finding himself mired in murder. The crime itself and a Columbo like Jan Arvan bring a touch of suspense to the picture but overall it is a more frustrating than tragic B in which the two myopic leads could settle matters by each being given a good shaking and told to grow up.

Hugo Haas' films are never pleasant, there is an uncomfortable uneasiness dominating all his films, but they are always very well written and therefore of lasting interest. This is one of his most unpleasant films giving an inside view of the backstage of cinema making, exposing intrigues and base money interests in a cinema director's worst nightmare, being subject to blackmail of such an extremely vicious kind that he can't get out of it except by responding in the same way. It's all about a movie extra who gets a chance of a stand in and fails miserably by showing herself a bad actress, which she takes too personally and decides to take a gruesome revenge on the director, the over-reaction of a wannabe who can't realise her own limitations - a bad loser of exorbitant proportions. She does not realise she is falling but has to bring innocents with her down in the fall at any price. This is a shocker but extremely well written, and although you will be horrified you will be fascinated at the same time and be stuck like the director to the very end.

By the time he made this, his seventh independent production, Hugo Haas evidently had plenty to get off his chest both about dealing with producers and with blondes; the studio setting (as well on saving on sets) providing interesting glimpses of both the mechanics and compromises involved in the filmmaking process.

Cynically manipulated by the law by appealing to his conscience; the final shot memorably echoes that that opened the film.

B queen Cleo Moore is known affectionately as the "Queen of the B Movie Bad Girls" among latter-day movie buffs for her string of 1950's melodramas but actually in most of her films she's a fairly good girl who makes bad choices. That's not the case in THE OTHER WOMAN where she plays a malevolent blonde so vicious she comes close to making Ann Savage's legendary Vera in DETOUR look angelic.

Cleo stars as Sherry Stewart, a bitter film extra who is suddenly given a chance at a bit part with lines by film director Hugo Haas. Hopelessly incompetent at saying her three lines, she is gently replaced by another woman. Irrational and furious at Haas, she sets up an elaborate scheme to blackmail Hugo if not destroy him.

Although she looks sensational in one segment in a black gown and wrapped in white fur, Cleo's character is presented as cheap and a bit unbalanced and she receives some of the least flattering cinematography of her career, apparently to emphasize the character's hardness and lack of class. There are some good scenes (Sherry's disastrous attempt attempt at acting, her inner humiliation as the extras and crew smirk) but it seems a bit ironic for the less-than-spectacular director Haas to play a director with ambitions of art. This is one of Haas' better acting performances however as the luckless soul who doesn't know what has hit him, a staple film noir situation. Cleo is very good in a rather sketchy role as a vengeful blonde out of control. THE OTHER WOMAN is not likely to land on anyone's list of favorite movies but it is a fairly intriguing and unusual film noir set in Hollywood.