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Infamie

Original title: The Come On
  • 1956
  • 1h 23m
IMDb RATING
6.1/10
297
YOUR RATING
Infamie (1956)
Film NoirCrimeDrama

Unscrupulous con woman gets involved in murder.Unscrupulous con woman gets involved in murder.Unscrupulous con woman gets involved in murder.

  • Director
    • Russell Birdwell
  • Writers
    • Whitman Chambers
    • Warren Douglas
  • Stars
    • Anne Baxter
    • Sterling Hayden
    • John Hoyt
  • See production info at IMDbPro
  • IMDb RATING
    6.1/10
    297
    YOUR RATING
    • Director
      • Russell Birdwell
    • Writers
      • Whitman Chambers
      • Warren Douglas
    • Stars
      • Anne Baxter
      • Sterling Hayden
      • John Hoyt
    • 12User reviews
    • 3Critic reviews
  • See production info at IMDbPro
  • See production info at IMDbPro
  • Photos3

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    Top cast11

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    Anne Baxter
    Anne Baxter
    • Rita Kendrick
    Sterling Hayden
    Sterling Hayden
    • Dave Arnold
    John Hoyt
    John Hoyt
    • Harold King aka Harley Kendrick
    Jesse White
    Jesse White
    • J.J. McGonigle
    Wally Cassell
    Wally Cassell
    • Tony
    • (as Walter Cassell)
    Alex Gerry
    Alex Gerry
    • Larry Chalmers
    Paul Picerni
    Paul Picerni
    • Jannings- Assistant D.A.
    Theodore Newton
    Theodore Newton
    • Detective Capt. Getz
    Carol Kelly
    • Julie - Tony's Girl
    • (as Karolee Kelly)
    Tyler McVey
    Tyler McVey
    • Detective Hogan
    Lee Turnbull
    • Detective Tinney
    • Director
      • Russell Birdwell
    • Writers
      • Whitman Chambers
      • Warren Douglas
    • All cast & crew
    • Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

    User reviews12

    6.1297
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    Featured reviews

    6melvelvit-1

    Bargain basement noir with a fervent femme fatale

    Allied Artists' plot twisty low-budget noir opens with shapely con-artist Anne Baxter emerging from the Pacific to come on to restless fisherman Sterling Hayden who immediately falls hook, line, and sinker. Before you know it, she's begging him to kill her brutal partner-in-crime but Anne isn't wrapped too tight and their plans soon spiral out of control...

    In 50s B movies where the budget is spent on the salaries of stars on the cusp of "past their prime", it's their chemistry that counts and although there's none here, it's not for lack of trying on the leading lady's part. Anne Baxter certainly doesn't hold anything back in what amounts to a dry run for her scheming Nefritiri in THE TEN COMMANDMENTS and it's kind of campy seeing her vamp it up in broad strokes, especially since she's no spring chicken. Sterling Hayden always seems the same for some reason and was no different than he was in CRIME OF PASSION (1957) when he steeled himself to make love to a mature Barbara Stanwyck -but at least here he does it in swim trunks, albeit briefly. Quirky character actor John Hoyt smoothly plays Anne's control freak "husband" as a civilized sadist while a rumpled Jesse White (TV's Maytag repairman) provides the sleaze as the two-bit private dick Hoyt hires to watch his wayward woman. The twists and turns the story takes keep the pulpy pot boiling until the star-crossed lovers come full circle in the surf and although Baxter & Hayden are no threat to Romeo & Juliet, the body count is satisfying at least. The director (not that it matters) was publicist Russell Birdwell who coined the tagline "How would you like to tussle with Russell?" for THE OUTLAW and would go on to make the preposterous THE GIRL IN THE KREMLIN with two -make that three- glam-mannequins: the life-like lunk Lex Barker and chattering magyar Zsa Zsa Gabor in a dual role.
    6planktonrules

    mildly interesting...but perhaps one twist too many.

    "The Come On" is a film from Allied Artists...the company that formerly was known as Monogram Studios. Both outfits were mostly known for lower budgeted B-pictures (particularly Monogram) and so when I saw the company logo, I adjusted my expectations a bit lower.

    Rita (Anne Baxter) and Dave (Sterling Hayden) meet on a beach in Mexico and the chemistry is certainly there. After a long lip-lock, Rita rushes off...to see the man who poses as her husband. The pair are a couple of grifters who make a good living cheating people. So how does Dave come into all this? Well, when Rita threatens to leave her partner and run off with Dave, all sorts of bad things start happening...and guns start blazing.

    While the story is exciting, sometimes a film has too many twists...so many that everything seems a bit contrived...contrived, but still pretty good. Not bad...but I think it could have been better...especially at the end.
    lor_

    Fantastic film noir

    Two genres: Horror and Porn have one characteristic in common: a morbid approach to the subject matter. Allied Artists' relatively obscure 1956 release "The Come On" is late-period film noir, like Welles' "Touch of Evil" coming several years after the post-war genre was dwindling, but is singularly morbid and fatalistic in its approach.

    With Anne Baxter and Sterling Hayden as the star-crossed lovers (plus veteran John Hoyt a rather amazing villain), the movie is bookended by visually arresting scenes set on a remote beach in Mexico, where Anne and Sterling first meet and finally face their inevitable fate, staged in an idyllic way that contrasts with the traditional look and mood of noir.

    Her casting is a key to the movie's success. She begins the movie looking very sexy in her bathing suit, conjuring up any number of 1950s blonde bombshells like Mamie Van Doren, Anita Ekberg, Greta Thyssen or Juli Reding. But instead we have the Oscar-winning Anne Baxter, just as sexy without pinup credentials, and providing the powerful acting her bustier peers could not dream of bringing to the role of a classic femme fatale that screams "lovely but deadly".

    With many, many plot twists that are increasingly hard to swallow, the movie verges on fantasy by film's end. It is notable in its emphasis on misogyny, with every male character an exteme example of male chauvinist. Hayden's opening scene on the beach plays like textbook sexual harassment, and Anne's relationship with heavy John Hoyt is an amazingly morbid portrait of codependecny created by his domination/submission approach to her. Even the private eye played so well by a well-cast Jesse White manipulates Anne unmercifully.

    After watching this rather strange movie, I was surprised at how obscure its filmmakers were: director Russell Birdwell directed a couple of early talkies (in 1929 and 1933) and then this film and the even stranger "The Girl in the Kremlin" (with Lex Barker and Zsa Zsa Gabor!) almost three decades later -what a career gap! Novelist/screenwriter Whitman Chambers similarly has few screen credits, but is responsible for a true noir classic "Blonde Ice".
    8clanciai

    Romantic passion is not enough to get out of a racket

    It has all the typical ingredients of a standard noir: crime, misery, blackmail, murder, motivation of money, scoundrels and at least one honest chap who commits the mistake of falling in love with the wrong woman, who is a racketeer, has always been so and is deeply involved with racketeers, as she officially but not legally is married to one of the worst of them, a completely ruthless criminal. We are used to see Anne Baxter in such roles, they were the kind of roles she was an expert on, she usually played them out with great passion, and so she does here with a vengeance. Sterling Hayden is the honest man, a fisherman, who isn't stupid but he is too sunken in love not to be bogged down in the confusion of it. John Hoyt is convincing enough as the villain, you hate him from the beginning and there are no mitigating circumstances in anything he does, you simply can't expect anything of him but the worst, which is what he delivers. Anne Baxter's luckless character does have mitigating circumstances though, she was somehow born out of luck which always has kept hounding her, and which she desperately tries to sort herself out of, while she only succeeds in making it worse. She is a tragic figure.
    5bmacv

    Anne Baxter, Sterling Hayden go through paces in routine crime thriller

    During the 1950s, Anne Baxter appeared in any number of routine, less than distinguished crime thrillers – last gasps of the dying noir cycle that were long on plot but short on style. One of them, The Come-On, is a warmed-over tale of murder and duplicity, but Baxter, bless her trouper's heart, gives it her considerable all as though she were starring in a major-studio `A' production.

    Coming out of the surf down in Mexico, Baxter finds Sterling Hayden ogling her. They strike sparks and agree to meet aboard his boat, the imaginatively christened Lucky Lady. She abruptly leaves their rendezvous; later, in a bar, Sterling sees her with her drunken, abusive husband (John Hoyt). It happens, however, that Baxter and Hoyt aren't really married but partners in a racket – high-class grifters. Only Baxter wants out and wants Hayden to help her – by murdering Hoyt.

    It's a mechanical, wheels-within-wheels plot, featuring a mercenary gumshoe (Jesse White) and `accidents' with missing bodies that turn out to be neither missing nor bodies, at least in the dead sense. Through it all, Baxter, emotes all over the place (never more effectively than in a scene near a mail chute, where an incriminating letter may or may not be headed to the police). Sterling's role is less meaty: He's not quite the chump, but except for throwing a couple of slaps and punches, he's pretty passive. Come to think of it, he appeared in any number of routine, less than distinguished crime thrillers during the 1950s, too.

    Storyline

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    Did you know

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    • Quotes

      Rita Kendrick: [of Dave] He's here, I love him, what are you going to do about it?

      Harold King aka Harley Kendrick: There's only thing I can do about it for now: Wait. Wait, till you get tired of your dirty-necked fisherman.

      Rita Kendrick: You'll have a long wait!

      Harold King aka Harley Kendrick: I think not. You're not the type of girl who passes up a fortune for hamburgers and beans.

    • Connections
      Featured in It's Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books (1988)

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    Details

    Edit
    • Release date
      • December 13, 1957 (France)
    • Country of origin
      • United States
    • Official site
      • Streaming on "Nocturne Theatre" YouTube Channel
    • Language
      • English
    • Also known as
      • The Come On
    • Filming locations
      • Balboa, Newport Beach, California, USA(Commercial fishing dock where Tony Margoli keeps his boat)
    • Production company
      • Lindsley Parsons Productions
    • See more company credits at IMDbPro

    Tech specs

    Edit
    • Runtime
      • 1h 23m(83 min)
    • Color
      • Black and White
    • Aspect ratio
      • 2.00 : 1

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