I'm wondering after seeing this when it's Debra Paget Stern at the electric chair if she'll break into "Death Cometh to Me" which she sang in "The Ten Commandments" once upon a time when she was an A-list actress. She gives an absolutely wretched performance as a cold-blooded thief and killer who allows Terry Moorere to take the rap for a murder she committed. All she does is snare and scream and Bello, a one-dimensional harpy performance as opposed to the gentle character she played in the Cecil B. Demille epic. Moore isn't much better in this film that she produced that was apparently a statement against the death penalty even though it's obvious that her and Paget would be assassinated by the critics.
This is so melodramatic that I wonder if it influence John Waters in his creation of the Dawn Davenport role in "Female Trouble". Paget play as a character strickly one-dimensional who influences her boyfriend to look up old girlfriend in an effort to get her involved in a safe robbery, but Moore wants no part of a life of crime, something she's giving up to sing in a nightclub. Her big hit from this, "Love is like a Roulette Wheel" is a deliciously tacky song. In fact, everything about this, from the script to the character development to all of the performances and all of the twists, are straight out of dime-store pulp novels. I certainly enjoyed it, but subtle it is not. It was obviously very cheaply made, and as a low budget film noir, does have some interesting photographic elements especially the downtown Los Angeles tram ("Angels Flight") which I've seen in other cheap second-rate film noir camp classics. If there was ever a film ripe for parody, this is it.
This is so melodramatic that I wonder if it influence John Waters in his creation of the Dawn Davenport role in "Female Trouble". Paget play as a character strickly one-dimensional who influences her boyfriend to look up old girlfriend in an effort to get her involved in a safe robbery, but Moore wants no part of a life of crime, something she's giving up to sing in a nightclub. Her big hit from this, "Love is like a Roulette Wheel" is a deliciously tacky song. In fact, everything about this, from the script to the character development to all of the performances and all of the twists, are straight out of dime-store pulp novels. I certainly enjoyed it, but subtle it is not. It was obviously very cheaply made, and as a low budget film noir, does have some interesting photographic elements especially the downtown Los Angeles tram ("Angels Flight") which I've seen in other cheap second-rate film noir camp classics. If there was ever a film ripe for parody, this is it.