Did you know that Billy Wilder had a brother and that his name was Billy too? In fact W Lee Wilder had more of a claim on “Billy” than Billy did, being two years older than his more famous sibling and having actually been baptised William. Billy’s birth name was Samuel.
W Lee Wilder also worked in the film biz, though down the chain quite a bit. He specialised in making shorts about church music in the Southern USA. There were 16 of those, produced to little acclaim. When W Lee was not ploughing this furrow he was busy in another, churning out unremarkable if not downright terrible low-budget sci-fi like 1954’s Killers from Space.
The Big Bluff came a year after that excursion into schlock’s outer limits and is a move into the sort of noirish thriller brother Billy did so well. Its great plus is John Bromfield in the lead role, as a thoroughly rotten sort trying to separate a young, rich and naive heiress from her money before the terminally ill woman croaks.
Working to thwart Ricardo De Villa (Bromfield) is his target’s secretary-companion Marsha (Eve Miller), and lurking in the background is sultry temptress and nightclub singer Fritzie (Rosemarie Stack billed as Rosemarie Bowe, because this was made a year before she married Robert Stack). Fritzie is in a double act with her jealous husband Don (Eddie Bee), but her loins have De Villa’s name on them. She and De Villa are cut from the same villainous cloth and are planning on running off together. The only snag is De Villa’s lack of money. Hence the move on poor benighted Valerie Bancroft (Martha Vickers).
While De Villa tries to manipulate the money out of Valerie, Marsha follows along three paces behind, slow to realise there’s something not quite right about the charming De Villa and then consistently outpaced by his fleet footwork. This man is a professional, whereas Marsha is an amateur learning (fast) on the job.
The crunch comes when De Villa finally manoeuvres Valerie into marriage and Dr Peter tells him that married life seems to be doing his new wife some good. Maybe she won’t die so soon after all – De Villa has mended her weak heart, unfortunately for him.
It’s a good ironic plot development but Wilder Sr doesn’t milk the moment. He keeps the action moving along the entire time and Bromfield plays up to the stereotype of the unreliable Latin lover with lots of lusty energy. He makes a great heel and though there’s obviously a development marked “comeuppance” heading De Villa’s way, Bromfield plays him the entire time as a man in charge of the situation.
De Villa/Devil, Fritzie/Frisky – the names more or less tell us who the baddies are. Everyone else in this story – Valerie, Marsha, Valerie’s doctor Peter Kirk (Robert Hutton) and Fritzie’s largely missing-in-action husband Don – comes across as a touch vanilla.
In the end it isn’t the most compelling of films and there are some truly diabolical moments, like the scene early on where Valerie is first told that she’s going to die young, played by Vickers as if the household were out of ice cream. But the good bits are good, by which I mostly mean Bromfield – then riding the crest of his career in B movies before retiring to become a fisherman – and to a slightly lesser extent Stacke/Bowe’s Fritzie, the femme fatale of the piece.
Wilder and Bromfield would re-unite the following year for Manfish (aka Calypso), a cross between a seafaring adventure and monster movie that played to both of their interests. I’m not in a rush to see it, though, come on, Manfish – doesn’t that sound intriguing?
The Big Bluff – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
