Infamie

Anne Baxter was assuredly one of America's finest actresses whose sheer professionalism enabled her to shine regardless of the material. She had 'gone blonde' for Hitchcock in 'I Confess' and decided to stay that way for a while. This change of hair colour may not have brought her better films but it certainly accentuated her extraordinary sensuality.

From the moment she emerges from the water in a two-piece swimsuit in this potboiler one is 'hooked' and it is her subsequent performance that keeps one watching. The character of Rita is one of film's most fascinating femme fatales who spells trouble with a capital 'T'. She is ably supported by John Hoyt, suitably reptilian as a blackmailer and Jesse White as a venal private investigator. She finds true love with the fisherman of Sterling Hayden but their relationship is, naturally, doomed from the outset.

The film itself, one of five made by former publicist Russell Birdwell, is in truth pretty dire but is redeemed by the performances and by having Ernest Haller behind the camera.

Hayden, one of Hollywood's mavericks, has a thankless part. He professed to hate filming but his persona was at least used to great effect by Stanley Kubrick. Such a pity that 'tax problems' prevented his playing Quint in 'Jaws'. As for Miss Baxter, it was Cecil B. de Mille who came to her rescue with 'The Ten Commandments'.

This splendid artiste never gave less than her best and it is only fitting that the final words be hers: "Acting is not what I do. It is what I am."

Anne Baxter and John Hoyt have a nice racket. They're in a bad marriage, but there's always a sympathetic man to help her out, with a check to let her run and hide.... and then Hoyt shows up and demands more money, because what he giving his wife the money for? But when Sterling Hayden shows up, it's different. This time, she realizes, it's really love. She confesses it all to Hayden, and he forgives her. But will Hoyt let her go?

It's an ambitious Allied Artists movies straight down my strike zone when it comes to what I like: con men and women weaving a tale that drags in not only the suckers in the movie, but me. Unfortunately, it doesn't do that, although it took me a bit of time to recognize it. That settled, th twists that were offered after that were not surprises at all, just as inevitable as the shootout at the end of a B western.

There are some good performances here, including Mr. Hoyt and Jesse White as a crooked PI. Alas, the leads were not compelling: Hayden , as he so often did in this phase of his career, seemed anxious to get back on his boat, and Miss Baxter seems to play it too broad in overcompensation.

"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.

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.

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".