User Reviews

Never in the annals of film history has one man screwed up his life as badly as Dr. Richard Talbot, played by Kent Smith. From the very beginning of this film, Talbot's life unravels, at first very slowly, but, as the film progresses, in a hideously downward spiral that goes out of control by the end of the film. Watching this film makes one want to chant `I'm glad I'm not this guy!' over and over again. Kent Smith's antics as Dr. Talbot in this film make Fred Mac Murray's Walter Neff of `Double Indemnity' or Wendell Corey's Cleve Marshall in `The File of Thelma Jordan' look like child‘s play. Both of these movies can scare you silly regarding infidelity, but still, there is no comparison.

As the film begins, Talbot is portrayed as a straight-laced family man; an individual who has no clue about the world around him save for his family and work. This, of course, doesn't last too long. Enter Nora Prentiss. Ann Sheridan does a superb job portraying the alluring Nora, a nightclub singer who gets clipped by an automobile while she's crossing the street. Just by luck, Talbot is outside of his office and sees the accident. Being a doctor, he brings her up to his office in order to repair the damage, which consists of a bruised knee. The ride downhill to ruin begins for Dr. Talbot, first in a subtle way. He becomes tempted to see her perform in the nightclub across the street from his workplace. You can feel the rush toward disaster get a little quicker at this point.

First it's dancing, then it's a jaunt to his summer cabin when the family is away on a trip, then it's expensive gifts, then it's his coming home in the wee hours of the morning. By then his wife, played by Rosemary De Camp, becomes suspicious, but (miraculously) maintains her reserved attitude about what's happening around her and her family. The gnawing anxiety inside of her finally prompts her to angrily quip, `Not everyone in San Francisco is in poor health' or "I wonder what's going on inside of you" to her husband during one breakfast. Of course this is the day of their daughter Bonita's birthday which, of course, he forgets because of his frequent late evening trysts with Nora. You can feel the plunge toward certain disaster getting more apparent, just like feeling a noose being put around one's neck.

It gets so bad by this time that he can't even concentrate on his work. Before a New York doctor witnessing an operation, he almost kills the patient. Of course this happens after Nora tells him that she wants to call it quits (good timing!). Talbot can't give her up. He pursues her like a male moth pursues a pheromone laden female. She keeps pushing him away, but nothing can stop this guy by now.

By now everyone viewing this film has a clue that this guy is tormented by the demon of infidelity. He feels like a trapped rat in a corner. He wants to divorce his wife, but lacks the courage to tell her. The viewer can feel the gnawing dilemma within Dr. Talbot and by now is REALLY glad that he's not in his shoes! Enter Walter Bailey, played by John Ridgely. Bailey is a heart patient who, coincidentally, collapses and dies in Dr. Talbot's office the moment he is writing a note to his wife asking for a divorce. Talbot notices that Bailey is the same age, height and weight as himself. In a day before DNA identification, Talbot sees a way out of his dilemma. He places his ring, watch and money clip on Bailey, drives his 1941 Buick to a cliff somewhere in Carmel, CA, douses the interior of the car with alcohol and sets it on fire with (of course) Bailey in the driver's seat. It gets much worse, by the way...

So, Talbot "kills" himself in his endeavor to by with Nora. The continuing downward spiral gets a little more bizarre and precarious... He takes off to New York City with Nora and keeps informed with San Francisco newspapers about his death. He then notices that the District Attorney is investigating his death, so another factor is introduced in the plot: paranoia. He and Nora stay shut up in the hotel they're living in. Nora is perturbed that they're not living a "normal" life like everyone else. She is also confused as to why he is acting the way he is, not knowing what's being written in the San Francisco papers.

Talbot becomes even more paranoid when they go out dancing one evening and he runs into the same doctor who watched that botched operation mentioned earlier. He tells Nora that they have to leave NOW without explaining to her what the problem is. By now Nora is really perturbed about what's going on so she confronts him. He finally explains to her the mess that he got himself into, all because he wanted to be with her. The walls start to close in on Talbot as you can see him deteriorate in the seclusion of his hotel room. Hotel meals, newspapers and alcohol are all that he looks forward to in his `prison'. Nora gets a job as a singer at Phil DiNardo's (played by Robert Alda) nightclub and manages to make a living for both herself and her `prisoner' boyfriend.

Still another factor appears in the plot: jealousy. Talbot, who by now is calling himself Thompson, becomes enraged that Nora is spending too much time at the nightclub and with Phil. It doesn't help any when he reads in the gossip pages how Nora and Phil are `an item'. One night he slips out of his hotel room and goes to the nightclub, pummeling DiNardo and fleeing in the latter's car. As can be expected in this film, he speeds off, is pursued by the police and has an accident resulting in severe facial injuries. He treats his injuries like a blessing, thinking that his being altered in this way can let him live a `normal' life in the great outdoors without being identified by anyone. Can Dr. Talbot really put away his past self now? Not a chance. In perfect timing, the law arrests him because of a fingerprint identification on the can of alcohol he used in order to destroy his previous identity. Whew! They extradite him back to California where he is tried for the death of himself. He is so disfigured that not even his wife or past colleague, Dr. Joel Merriman, recognize him. He is sentenced to die and he makes Nora promise never to tell anyone who he is. Would you? Warner Brothers advertised the movie with a tremendous advertising campaign. The billboards asked: `If you were Nora, would you talk?'

If there ever was a deterrent for philandering, this is it. The film is filled with a tragedy of errors from beginning to end. Dr. Talbot's fall from grace is truly astounding. His impulsiveness at throwing caution to the wind, as one would say, shows the stupidity of one man on his ability in screwing up his life big time. It really leaves one chanting over and over again, `I'm glad I'm not this guy!'

In that fateful way that film-noir operates, Dr. Talbot (Kent Smith) meets Nora (Ann Sheridan) accidentally. Doubly so, because she's had an accident. Though the Doc is a solid, respectable guy, he quickly wants to junk everything for Nora. Then, to sort of mess with fate, he fakes his own death so can disappear with Nora. That's a leap in the dark.

Like many noir films, the story unfolds via flashback--a jail house self-confession. With this device, there's a sort of 'if only I could go back to then, then none of this would've...' quality. In effect, the flashback lets the viewer identify with the protagonist (Dr. Richard Talbot here). "What was he hiding, what did he do?" He begins, referring to himself. Right off we see that his wife Lucy (Rosemary DeCamp) is bossy and regimented.

Somewhat arrogantly, he upbraids his colleague Dr. Joel Merrian for being late, when he's late himself. "Am I dead or something?" moons Nora as she comes to in Richard's office after her close call in the street. She seems to have fun with everyone around her. "I, I seem to amuse you", Richard stammers. It's clear that she unsettled him; it's also obvious that he's taken with her. On her return check-up, he shows interest by finding out where to catch her singing act.

Alluring act it is. He's sort of a fish out of water sitting alone, watching her. "What's a married man like you, with a strict routine, doing in a place like this?" She badgers him. Phil (Robert Alda), the club owner, pops in. Suddenly Richard's got an alias, Mr. Thompson. Oh man, now Richard's revved-up; next day, he's taking her up to his mountain cabin. She's so matter-of-fact comfortable that you can almost feel him churning inside--he feels great with her, but awkward, and definitely guilty. "This is a little different than most of my evenings," she intimates. More importantly, she confides that Phil wants her to move back East with him, but she doesn't want to.

She realizes that her 'thing' with Richard is dumb, and hopeless. She's right, but now it's her turn to give in to him. Suddenly, it's a full-blown affair. Now he's running late...all the time. Will be be found out? Lucy's suspicious. He doesn't show up for his daughter's birthday party. Anyway, as we suspect, he wants to 'manage' his affair. Ever the realist, Nora tells him to give her up. He insists that he'll ask for a divorce; otherwise, she'll take Phil up on his offer.

As usual, he waffles. She basically tells him to get lost. Meanwhile, back at the hospital, he nervously goes into surgery. Nora is splitsville for New York. But now he's desperate, babbling, pleading. "I'll find some way." He does, writing a note to his wife, taking insurance policies out of his safe, etc. But again he hesitates, tears up the note. Ahh, but Fate arrives in the form of his dying heart patient. Whether inadvertently or not, his hesitation means that the guy dies. Tantalizingly, he notices that the vital statistics on the dead guy are just like his.

So, strangely decisive, he quickly gathers the dead guy's stuff, puts him in his car, which he incinerates, and pushes it off a cliff. Seems to work: we see a grieving widow and office staff. One substantial curiousity is that, because of his affair, there's money missing. Joel is immediately suspicious. He finds the crumpled up note. Joel goes to Homicide. The old burned-beyond-recognition status of the corpse (what about dental records?) mucks things up.

Over in New York, he reads his own obituary in the S.F. paper, but also notices that the death is under investigation. He's skittish with Nora--she doesn't know about his 'death.' He tries to sell her on 'waiting until the divorce is final' deal, but she knows something's up. This goes on for months; hiding out in a hotel room. So he gives in, and agrees to go to Phil's new club. Phil jokingly implies that their absence must mean that there's some hidden crime. Then Richard bumps into an S.F. acquaintance.

So he comes clean with Nora. Wasn't it dumb to keep her in the dark? "How did you expect to get away with it?" She says, right as usual. Ironically, he's no better off than before, as he's reduced to skulking around again. Not surprisingly, Phil tries to get Nora's attention; after all, he's been good to her for years. But, just as she tries to turn him away, Richard shows up, jealous like crazy. He attacks Phil, runs off, and we get the movie's second fiery crash.

Ironically, Richard thinks that maybe everything's Jake. Phil, the actual gentleman here, doesn't even press charges. Equally important, the crash has left Richard with permanent facial injuries that are pretty much an iron clad disguise. But, not so fast; we then get the S.F. cops indicting him for murdering himself. This would be the ultimate plot twist for a murder mystery. The problem is, it's nuts.

For one thing, assuming the actual corpse wouldn't have fingerprints, it would still be somewhat incongruous that the victim and perpetrator have the same prints. I do see that Richard wouldn't have fingerprints on file with the police, but I would think his prints would still be all over his house. So, why not try to establish that he indeed is Richard? His reasoning for not wanting to live doesn't add up. Nora advises him to 'confess' and go back to his wife. Even if Lucy won't have him, Nora still hasn't thrown in the towel yet. But he simply doesn't care, and we end up with Phil waiting for Nora.

Until the 'fake' death, Nora Prentiss was very good. And it was still quite good until the end sequence, which dropped it another notch or so. Maybe it would've been better to build Phil's character up a little more. It's a neat device that the Lucy/Richard/Nora triangle is replaced by the Richard/Nora/Phil set-up. But Phil seems an onlooker the whole time; most of his contacts with Nora are punctuated by Richard's appearance.

Going back a bit, we really can't take for granted the alleged anonymity of the dead heart patient. He's not a transient--he's got to have had some history--in fact, Joel knows him, has treated him. Wouldn't Joel wonder what had happened to the guy? He was a regular patient with a dangerous condition. I've mentioned that his dental records could still have been used to identity him. I just can't buy this used-car of a plot with its leaking oil.

My other question is Nora's character. Sheridan gives a great performance, seductive but honest; tough but vulnerable, and very loyal, very loving. Uniquely, Nora inverts the femme fatale stereotype into the girl-next-door who's also a dream. But, given Richard's behavior, she's just too good for him. She stays with him way too long. The fact that she's squirreled herself away in the New York hotel with him for ages is not believable.

Nora Prentiss is worth watching for the solid performances and the very tense first part, but it just gets too messy the further in we go. 7/10.

This movie allows the viewer no easy out. Its female character cannot be hated. Ann Sheridan, not generally a favorite of mine, is excellent in a subdued performance and her character is very honorable. Well, apart from fooling around with a married man. But without that, we'd have no story.

The absolute destruction of the Kent Smith character is shocking. It is not entirely plausible psychologically, but this is a movie. His wife is cold and uninteresting. She doesn't even recognize him in court after he's had plastic surgery necessitated by an accident. And Sheridan is gorgeous and beautifully costumed and coifed.

Robert Alda, a very handsome and talented actor who ought to have been a huge star and but is known primarily because of his real-life son Alan, is likable as Sheridan's admiring boss.

But this movie is about the total degradation and disintegration of a man who's an upstanding citizen when we meet him. We see him leave his family, forego his career, become a disheveled savage in the identity he's taken on to be with the woman he lusts after, and finally we see him convicted of a murder he did not commit. But he is beyond caring about saving himself and we are left with our mouths agape.

Ah, the life of Dr. Richard Talbot...fine medical practice, wife and two kids, nice house in San Francisco, cabin in the mountains...then one day he meets--Nora Prentiss.

Talbot (Kent Smith) treats nightclub singer Nora Prentiss (Ann Sheridan) after a minor accident and then falls madly in love with her. His stuck-in-a-rut lifestyle, as well as his fussy, petulant wife (Rosemary DeCamp) send him over the edge, and the viewer can't blame him much. Talbot desperately wants to be with Prentiss, but can't bring himself to ask for a divorce, then in desperation fakes his death using the body of a patient who has dropped dead in his office.

Talbot and Prentiss then move to New York, where Talbot can't practice (he's supposedly dead) and doesn't tell Prentiss about his faked death. Eventually he confesses, steals Prentiss' boss' (Robert Alda's) car and crashes it, horribly disfiguring himself. Talbot is arrested, hauled back to San Francisco, and because everyone thinks he's someone else, is tried for his own murder! The final scene with Talbot going to the electric chair is good but unrelentingly downbeat.

I liked "Nora Prentiss" because of its attractive cast, good story, and interesting plot. Vincent Sherman directs in sure if not spectacular style. The presence of such actors as Bruce Bennett and an unbilled Roy Gordon add much to the movie. My big objection--and it's common among 1940s films--are the smart-mouthed, sarcastic, know-it-all cops who arrest Talbot. If the movie police were so smart, why didn't they figure out the real story?

In the sweepstakes of film noir bleakness this one just breaks the meter, I'll have you know right off the start. It's pitch black and can snuff the light out of your whole day.

It's also one of the most overwrought, which means that the several changes of story give us a kind of life that teeters on the edge of the believable and more on the side of cautionary fable. No one leaving the theater would be anything less than smacked in the face with the moral downfall of a man led astray by desire.

But set that aside and you'll see here some penetrating notation on the illusory nature of self.

It starts the way it usually does, perfectly upstanding family man chances to meet a woman one night. His previous life of being always punctually on time at the office and back home again for dinner with the family suddenly seems stifling in light of the excitement that being with her promises.

This desire for escape from humdrum routine is given to us visually in a drive with her to his cabin up to the mountains. A place of seclusion that is gathering dust because no one in the family wants to go there with him. He plays the piano for her, which he hadn't done in a long time.

So what does he do? He dies and disappears in a next life with her. How this is accomplished is one of those far-fetched changes of plot I was talking about that you'll just have to accept was the best solution that came to mind that night. But it's one of those masterful turns that film noir takes, suggestive of an illusory world and malleable self subject to capricious urge. I love everything about this shift, those anxious preparations to sail out of San Francisco, the notion that back home the wife had come to realize it had been tough on him.

So, in New York now everything ought to have been just the way he craved it. Away from routine that stifles the soul, alone with her, finally free to explore.

Except having disappeared the way he did, having shed the identity, he can no longer be the same person. He cannot take up his old practice again to make a living and even has to avoid anyone who might know him from that previous life.

This shift is one of the most startling depictions of desire, and can really jolt you if you watch with attention. It's not that we simply crave after things, that we get or not, and might be led astray in some vague moral sense or not. You'll see here how it hollows out the world, makes it concave. How, having traded away one life governed by more or less the same narrative but playing against a backdrop of implicit freedom, he finds himself in one where he's now prisoner of a meaningless freedom, no closer to the fulfillment he imagined.

Secluded in a hotel room, things grow unhinged, and there is more to glean here. It's not that he can't go out, he's perfectly free to. It's that, without the context of a larger life in which we come together, share talents, and see eaech other in the light of shared narrative, does it matter if he does? He's still (presumably) the same body, mind, personality, so what has been swept aside? Context.

The last part of the film is where it all unravels, therefore the most grotesque. There's growing anger and resentment between them. Our man is heavily made up now to look baleful and unkempt, a pathetic figure like out of a horror movie.

And then in another shift of story that you'll just have to buy, he finds himself back in that San Francisco life he left behind, only now he's recognized by no one and he's already dead in it. We have complete dissolution.

Pitch black but worth your while.

Sultry torch singer Ann Sheridan meets stodgy family man and doctor Kent Smith. Their affair escalates and when a patient dies in his office Smith sees a way out to fake his own death and elope with Sheridan.

Vincent Sheridan's melodrama is quite a trite affair, not by a long shot the film noir it claims to be, although photographed by James Wong Howe and scored by Franz Waxman. The script makes an effort to glue the pieces together, but rarely succeeds amidst all the inconsistencies. A few of the lines might be worth quoting; i.e. the doctor tells mistress-to-be that he is working on a paper on heart ailments and she retorts , "Only a paper, I could write a book!".

Kent Smith is a little low on charisma, Ann Sheridan looks glorious but has little to work with, and Bruce Bennett (who is still alive at almost 99 while I am writing this!) is a tall, handsome devil as the doctor's bachelor colleague.

Yes, this film is dumb. Let's see...to run away with another woman the doctor stages a fiery car crash with another man's body. Leaving the doctor with no way to earn a living. A divorce would have been so much simpler. Just plain dumb.

However, I always enjoy Ann Sheridan, and feel she was a very underrated actress. Not so sure this was a good movie for her...especially when you read some of the reviews of the time.

The surprise here was Kent Smith. One of those actors who you recognize him as being in movies you've seen, but not usually the leading man! He does nicely as the doctor here.

I know you may be thinking that you may not want to watch this film. But, oddly enough, it is a bit intriguing. Just not believable.

There are 3 supporting actors here that deserve mention. Bruce Bennett as the doctor's partner is nothing to brag about here. Robert Alda as a nightclub owner who's a decent man does nicely. Rosemary DeCamp, whom I usually enjoy seeing in supporting roles doesn't play a very loving wife here.

All in all, it's an okay film to watch once, although not necessarily for the right reasons.

Nora Prentiss is that kind of gal that can drive a man to insanity while still maintaining that mountainous hairdo she wears throughout the entire movie. She has that oomph that makes one unsuspecting Dr. Richard Talbot go progressively bonkers over her, do something nasty to a poor fellow, and then follow her halfway across the country while wallowing in paranoia because of what he did. At the same time, he also gets in quite deep in the obsessive department and demands to know why on earth is she accepting the advances of one Phil Dinardo (because even though she's a lounge singer, she is to be untouched and virginal like the Madonna). Of course Richard gets in a little over his head, his face suffers as a result and what do you know, things catch up with him. And Nora? Well, quite well, thank you, always sporting that massive pile of hair and looking smashing in every scene, sort of staying by her man (Richard that is), because she's such a Good Sport. Nora Prentiss is That Kinda Gal. If only she knew of the wonders of restraining orders....