Angela Lansbury Sex Kitten is the offer in A Life at Stake, a short and atmospheric noir from 1955 with a looser attitude to sex than was usual at the time.
But before we meet Angela’s minxy Doris (not the sexiest name in the world, but hey), we get an eyeful of our star, Keith Andes, stripped to the waist and showing off the physique that got him movie work in the 1950s.
He’s playing Edward Shaw, a down-on-his-luck property developer introduced to rich, married and bored Doris Hillman by a go-between lawyer. In scenes thick with flirtatiousness, all set by a swimming pool where Doris is sunning herself in a skimpy swimsuit, Edward tries to concentrate on her proposition – your knowhow and my money will make glorious business together, she says. And, possibly, she’s also hinting, we can do other things as well.
Off they set, the wary Edward and the worldly Doris, on their new collaboration to develop property in California. But Edward smells a rat, especially once he’s met her much older husband, Gus (Douglass Dumbrille), and been asked to up his life insurance, to cover all eventualities, merely a formality, he’s given to understand.
Surely the wife wants him for his body, or his immaculate 1950s hairstyle, or his smart mouth and his general all-round sexy man-appeal? Or is hapless Eddie being carefully manhandled towards the exit sign, with the obviously venal Hillmans ready to pocket the insurance money as he departs?
It’s classic femme-fatale stuff, played brilliantly by Lansbury, who blows hot and cold, hot and cold – we’re never quite sure whether Doris has a conscience, or feelings, or whether money is the only love in her life. We’d later see the cold-hearted Lansbury persona again in The Manchurian Candidate and in a sense she’s giving it a try-out here.
Andes, never really a name, sits just perfectly in the slot marked dupe and is also blowing two ways – smart and dumb, smart and dumb. Why does Edward come back for more once he’s convinced Doris is up to no good? Because his dick is doing the thinking, Andes suggests.
Which takes us to the femme not so fatale, Doris’s younger sister, Madge (their parents knew how to name them), a sweet and naive thing, pretty too, and possibly just enough of a lure away from Doris to save Edward’s life.
Noir to its fingertips – useless cops, night-time settings, bad babes, implacable fate grinding away somewhere in the background – it’s gained an extra layer of interest over the decades, an archaeological cultural interest, and not just because nice Angela Lansbury is on the wrong end of the Murder, She Wrote equation. Take the car that Doris drives, a Kaiser Darrin, the sort of thing a villain in a Batman movie might drive, with a grill that looks like the devil’s mouth. You don’t see those too often.
Perhaps slightly lost in the sexual steam is Dumbrille as Doris’s rich husband, a performance that’s very neatly judged to align Doris and Gus morally – they’re a bad lot, these two, possibly the worst thing that ever happened to each other. If it’s nothing else, this is a nicely drawn portrait of a couple who deserve each other.
Paul Guilfoyle directs. A former actor who made the jump, he gets good performances from all concerned – as actor-cum-directors so often do. And he builds up a well sustained head of paranoia and malevolence as Edward lumbers towards a dénouement in which everyone gets what’s coming to them.
It isn’t perfect – there is some plot business that seems unnecessary concerning a thousand dollar note – but it is pretty good, film noir condensed down to its basic elements in 78 pungent minutes.
A Life at Stake – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
