User Reviews

I recently watched one of my favorite "B" films of the 1950's Wicked Woman on Turner Classic Movies and it was fun to see again. Platinum blonde Beverly Michaels decked out all in white and prancing around in "slow motion" is a knockout in the title role. She is on the move for trouble and she gets plenty.After checking into a rooming house she gets a job as a hostess in a local bar and she connives a scheme to entice handsome owner Richard Egan and thats when the fun begins. Together they lock lips and sneak around his well meaning alcoholic wife Evelyn Scott which presents some tense moments. However character actor Percy Helton is also a border at the rooming house and has other ideas which could dampen the scheme. It all boils down to a knock down drag out finale which is hilarious thanks to the three key players. A treat for the "B" movie film buff this film is rarely shown and it is not on video.

Beverly Michaels, a long drink of ice water, plays Billie Nash, who blows into town on a Greyhound bus, rents space in a cheap boarding house, gets a job as a drinks waitress in a dive, and throws herself at the owner (Richard Egan). There are, however, complications. Egan's wife (Evelyn Scott)helps run the bar but drinks too much; Michael's across-the-hall neighbor (Percy Halton) is a lecherous "runt" with designs, and a habit of spying, on her. When Michaels and Egan plot to sell the bar and abscond to Mexico, the complications get out of hand. "Wicked Woman" is one of those mid-50s grade-Z features that is oddly compelling -- the acting is far better than you'd expect. And there's a grisly fascination in the depiction of the lousy rooms for rent with hotplates and heartache, and in the rough-and-tumble working-class saloons where late-stage alcoholism is a commonplace. The movie hints at darker developments that never really take place yet somehow maintains a curious, crummy integrity. Definitely worth a watch.

This is one of those movies that is just a little film but somehow, I can't describe it, it works for me! I love it! I love the black and white, the really dated environment, that blonde hoochie mama, the storyline, etc. etc. Just a fun movie to watch and escape with because it's quite campy. I think the ladies will like it and I never saw that blonde actress before but I thought she played her part well the way she just used the men and had them all drooling over her. She had a great figure too.

I'm not a Richard Egan fan but that's okay, she makes it worth watching!

You can't judge a book by its cover, unless you don't care to remain oblivious to what the book might contain. The same holds true for low-budget films like Wicked Woman. Yes, a thread of superficiality runs through it, but if we judge this film as "trashy" as one reviewer here did, we risk comparing it unfairly with other films that were simply not in the same league. I prefer to judge this film based on what it actually gives us, not what it could give us. Such films don't measure up to the five-star flicks of Film Noir but they supply the mortar around which the bricks are laid. This film served/serves a purpose with its glimpse of seedy boarding room in small town America, showing us the transiency of the period. Once upon a time I, too, chose to "Go Greyhound" as a means to my adventurous ends, and I appreciated the tone established when Billie Nash she steps off that smokey bus that brought to this ubiquitous town from who knows where...and then again at the end when it takes her away again, perhaps to yet another thread-bare town?

This was a fun movie to watch. I saw it last week while attending the SF Film Noir Festival.

Beverly was a knockout of a woman. One of the rare tall actresses. The makers of the film probably had a hard time finding other tall people to act along with her. The popular character actor Percy Helton shows up again as a nagging wanna be friend to the stunning Beverly who uses him for her gain.

The festival tried to get her to attend from her place in Arizona but she said no. Her son the editor Christopher Rouse also tried unsuccessfully to get her to San Francisco. Oh well it was still a lot of fun.

Seen on TCM in the wee hours, this sordid little noir features the bleached blonde sexpot Beverly Michaels who had been dumped by cheesy Svengali Hugo Haas having switched his attentions to Cleo Moore. Bev makes Marilyn look like a goddess. As she saunters through the dismal sets which include a rancid rooming house, a barful of working-class mediocrities, and generic city streets, swaying her hips with a pokerface, you know this girl has hit bottom and is not likely to go much farther up because all she has is sex for brains. [A late scene shows her with a toothy, gummy grin which may answer the unasked question: why does she so rarely smile?] Down to her last dollar she gets a room, a barmaid job, a slimy admirer across the hall (the weird, weird Percy Helton) and proceeds to seduce the barman (Richard Egan had fallen this far in only a few years?), his bar-owning lush of a wife, and go for the money. The idea is of a continuing cycle of spider trapping fly in her web of deceit and avarice. When the fly is devoured, she moves on to another town. My question: after a few more low-grade films and a couple of TV appearances, what happened to Beverly Michaels? Can't be the same one who shows up 30 years later as a party girl in a British film, can it?

Saw this 7/28/17 on a watchable version via YouTube. Not bad at all, does not try to push the budgetary limits. Rouse has a good script, and he keeps it moving. The leads, Beverly Michaels (a stick-limbed Mamie Van Doren), Richard Egan, Evelyn Scott, and Percy Helton all perform well. Scott, appearing as a boozy version of Rosemary DeCamp, gives a layered, believable performance as the wife of the Egan character. A larger than usual role for the reliably arachnoid Helton. The film hints, mercifully without showing, that Michaels yields to his sexual advances, a unique, unsettling milestone in a long career deserving of a Motion Picture Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement as a Homunculus. OK – maybe "Wicked Woman" does not strictly follow some "noir" rule book." But who cares about categories, other than just "movie"? And this is a pretty good one for the money! Seventy-seven minutes, and hard to find a second wasted.

Wicked Woman doesn't waste any time getting started. Billie Nash (Beverly Michaels) blows into town, finds a room to rent, meets her creepy neighbor, takes a job serving drinks in a bar, and sets her sights on Matt Bannister (Richard Egan), the bar's owner and her key to money and Mexico. That's the basic set-up - the rest is a trashy, good time.

Wicked Woman is a perfect example of making an entertaining film with no money. Everything looks cheap, but it hardly matters. In fact, the cheap look only adds to the overall tone and tawdry feeling. Director Russell Rouse and screenwriter Clarence Greene really get a lot of the $1.95 budget they had to work with. Beverly Michaels is a revelation. Her Billie, with that super slo-mo sashay, is perfect as the titular Wicked Woman. She oozes cheap sensuality. And, you'd have little difficulty believing she'd easily do away with Bannister's wife if it meant she gets what she wants. The rest of the cast is just as good with Egan, Percy Helton, and Evelyn Scott all giving nice performances.

My biggest complaint with Wicked Woman is the film's ending. I really wanted to see everything blow-up spectacularly in Billie's face. Billie never really gets what she deserves. And the way Bannister's wife so easily forgives him doesn't ring true. Bannister should also have suffered more. Still, these are minor quibbles. In the end, Wicked Woman is a rock solid little trashy B-noir that I easily recommend.

WICKED WOMAN is an essential "bad girl" B movie of the 1950's. Beverly Michaels was the first blonde to crack this market that decade and while she never reached the public fame and popularity of the slightly later Cleo Moore and Mamie Van Doren, she's one of the genre's major divas even with her tiny filmography. Michaels is at her bad girl best in WICKED WOMAN as Billie Nash, who blows into town with a mysterious past and no references, ending up in a cheap furnished room boarding house. Billie quickly vamps one of her neighbors Percy Helton into sharing his steaks, "loans", and a reference when she applies for a job at a local bar. Owner Evelyn Scott is dubious but agrees to give the girl a break. That first night Michaels meets Scott's hunky, slightly younger husband Richard Egan and all her gratitude toward Scott is forgotten as she quickly sets her trap to seduce Egan - and persuade him to sell the bar (which was Scott's to begin with) out from under Scott without her knowledge and for them to make a getaway to Mexico with the loot.

The cast is sensational for a B movie. Michaels is superb as the tough blonde who can get even tougher when in a foul mood or cornered. Richard Egan, just before his brief stint as a leading man/star in major motion pictures, is excellent as the good husband who can be had; it's a pleasure to see a sexy B movie bad girl have a hunky, sexy leading man which wasn't often the case. (Egan also appears to be the only person in the cast taller than the 5'9" Michaels, who towers over nearly every other costar.)

Evelyn Scott is terrific as well as a bloozy-floozy Myrna Loy-lookalike and there is a sensational featured turn from Percy Hilton, a highly distinct and recognizable character actor of the era who generally played bits on television as a sheepish but lovable nerd; here Percy is still the sheepish imp but able to be just as sleazy and predatory as those who cross his path. This is a truly fascinating look at the clawing and desperation of very-low income 1950's with dumpy, sparsely furnished rooms and one bathroom per floor in the boarding house.

The ending, as another reviewer noted, is a misfire alas and as someone else mentioned, a plot twist one is expecting never develops. Still, WICKED WOMAN is well worth tracking down (it can currently be seen on youtube) for a rare chance to see Beverly Michaels at her "baddest" best.

Percy Helton who plays Charlie Borg steals every scene he is in playing a lecherous older bachelor who will do just about anything to get his dirty little hands, and even dirtier little mind on his new co-tenant from across the hallway. The long legged actress Beverly Michaels who herself plays a bar maid named Billie Nash, a conniving hussy who rolls into town broke but not busted will hustle anyone for just about anything. Billie uses her sultry looks to get anything and everything from a free meal, to a new dress, to half the cash that the sale of the tavern she just started working in, if she can just convince her new boss and recent new lover Matt Bannister (Richard Egan) to sell the tavern from under his booze hound wife's nose.

Good old horny Charlie Borg (Percy Helton) has the hots for his new neighbor Billie Nash and initially Billie has Charlie wrapped around her long legs with just a smile and a shallow compliment. Whenever Billie reaches out her hand for a few bucks reluctantly Charlie provides what Billie wants but very quickly when something better comes along for Billie, she snubs old and creepy Charlie's advances and becomes quite mean in her comments to deliberately hurt Charlie's feelings and to make him stop bothering her.

This is a film about the sins of greed, lust, and deceit, and the three main characters, Billie, Matt and lonely old Charlie are all guilty of committing these sins. It is a story that happens every day in various parts of the world wherever men and women work and co-exist. If you have ever heard the expression , "if you never tell a lie you never have to worry about keeping your story straight" then this sums up the film Wicked Woman rather nicely.

It is a decent time waster, nothing more, nothing less. I give the film a 6 out of 10 IMDB rating for an early 1950's film noir.

A six foot tall platinum blonde wrapped in an impeccable stark white sexy outfit cinched with a wide gold or silver (black and white picture) belt comes down from a 1950s long distance bus at a small town someplace in the United States hinterland of that time. She steps down the bus and we see first her feet, also in white designer sandals.

Pretty soon we learn that she is starving and penniless. With that couple of scenes we know the movie will be totally unrealistic. She traveled who knows how many miles and hours in a bus with all its windows opened (we noticed that during the opening scenes, when the bus travels an empty desert road while the titles roll on), and anybody that has done that knows that one will get to the destination practically covered with dust, specially desert dust, so fine and sticky!!

The "wicked woman" of the title seems to be a small time crook. To me, a real wicked woman would have been --with her age and experience-- much better placed in the world. So this character is a sort of a looser.

I loved her "slow motion" way of walking, but it was a bit disappointing to see such a slinky body with a little girl's face and silly smile. On the other hand, and as a contrast, Richard Egan must have been the sexiest man on earth in the fifties!!

I thought the plot could have developed into much more interesting happenings, but it deflated quite fast as a bad soufflé. Do no waste your precious time on this one.

I really LOVE traditional film noir with its dark, atmospheric settings and bizarre camera angles, its staccato dialog full of over-the-top innuendo and fist-like bluntness, the tortured characters with their compulsions and secrets and the complex plots told in flashbacks and surprise twists.

Wicked Woman is the film noir that breaks all these rules but kept me glued to the screen. Whereas the typical film noir is highly stylized and artificial, Wicked Woman is played out in very natural, gritty locations and sets. Instead of shadowy streets and darkly lit rooms the femme fatale sashays in and out of well-lit scenes in a series of flashy all-white outfits accented by her platinum blonde hair.

In a typical noir, you feel that all the action is pre-ordained, that everybody is trapped in their situation and compelled to follow the script for their life. In Wicked Woman, the characters are free to choose, to make their own script. They are very complex and unpredictable in ways that don't feel contrived. When the danger gets ratcheted up in the second half of the film, you have NO idea how it will be resolved and you feel genuine suspense.

The acting is excellent, from the leads to the supporting cast, the performances are memorable and all lend to the authenticity.

Some people have pooh-poohed the ending -- it's NOT a typical noir there either. But it will will surprise you, and it will get you thinking...

Some will argue from all this, that Wicked Woman is not a noir film at all. Maybe they are right, perhaps it is the anti-noir. I'm OK with that -- it was still very entertaining.

Beverly Michaels rolls in on the bus, finds a cheap room and gets a job pushing booze at Evelyn Scott's bar. She keeps her eyes for the easy touch -- creepy tailor Percy Helton is anxious to mend her clothes for her, and Miss Scott's husband, Richard Egan, is tired of dealing with with a wife who's drinking up all the profits, and anxious to trade her in on a blonde whose waist seems to be about half of her two other ample statistics.

Miss Michaels does everything except chew gum and stick it behind her ear to indicate the sort of woman she is, and is fascinating in a trashy way, just smart enough to know she's dumb, and to also know that men are not going to look at her face when she talks. Quite clearly her performance impressed the co-writer and director of this movie, Russell Rouse. They got married a couple of years later, had a couple of kids, and stayed married until his death.

Unbelievably trashy movie that is strangely compelling. I couldn't stop watching this "B" flick, but the ridiculous ending was a letdown. It has some genuinely tense moments, especially when the lovers are in danger of being exposed.

Peroxide blonde floozy Michaels sashays into town with just enough money for rent and pretty much on the make. Being broke she decides to put her assets to work at a local tavern. The local guys behave like they've spent a lifetime on a desert island around Michaels who especially draws the admiration of hunky Egan and desperate Helton. Egan is smitten and ready to dump his alcoholic wife and will do anything for Michael's affections. Helton gets used, as usual, and eventually gets angry and resorts to blackmail, as usual. This moves along at a good pace and will keep your interest. The movie has some noirish aspects that never get fully developed due to the short duration of the film. Nevertheless there's enough tension to keep this interesting. The acting is good and I recommend to those that enjoy the noir genre.

When Beverly Michaels gets off the bus by just her looks and bearing you knopw this woman is trouble. Michaels who played these kind of parts, she is truly one Wicked Woman.

She gets a job at a bar owned by Richard Egan and Beverly Scott and she proves popular with the customers, even more popular with Egan. Theyatch a scheme involving selling the bar out from under Scott.

Comparisons with The Postman Always Rings Twice are too obvious to ignore. They should only have worked so well for Garfield and Turner with it's no harm no foul ending.

Percy Helton has a really great role as Michaels leering fellow roomer at the boardinghouse she's staying at. That same year in How To Marry A Millionaire he was giving Lauren Bacall the once, twice, thrice over. When he gets something on Michaels Percy does better.

Wicked Woman made for chump change as an independent film released by United Artists is a real sleeper. Beverly Michaels gets a great part as the kind of woman to stay clear of but we seldom do.

There was no specific reason for watching 'Wicked Woman'. It wasn't this time one of those films that was part of a completest quest to see everything available of certain actors, actresses and directors that left a big impression on me. Which has been my biggest reason many times. This time it was the very intriguing idea for the story (good concepts is another major reasons as well as talented casts) and the appetising title, as well as the IMDb recommendation, that drew me into seeing it.

'Wicked Woman' is above average, more than watchable fun with a fair share of good things, if not much more than that. It entertains, intrigues and the atmosphere is done just about right. Plus it has one heck of a lead performance. One did deserve a generally much better film, with better production values, a more developed plot and a better leading man. By all means, 'Wicked Woman' does do a lot right. It just didn't wow me and with the concept it could easily have done.

Beverly Michaels is the main reason to see 'Wicked Woman'. She is sensual, deliciously wicked and has a steely intensity that is perfect for her hard to forget role. Percy Helton is another draw, having a lot of fun as a very convincing slimeball. The music doesn't enhance as such the action but it is not at odds with the action and fits with the atmosphere. It is more than competently directed.

As well as tautly and intriguingly scripted, that doesn't have too much extraneous fat. The story pulled me in enough, isn't too obvious and has a good amount of tension, especially towards the end with a surprisingly violent confrontation.

Sadly against all of that, 'Wicked Woman' does look cheap and, other than Michaels' knockout wardrobe and some atmospheric lighting, the low budget and hurried time constraints show in the stagy settings and less than smooth editing. The film did need in my view a much longer length, to make the story more complete. Some good ideas are not properly explored.

Moreover, as mentioned by some the ending is truly ridiculous and rings completely false. May be biased though perhaps, being a non-fan of this type of ending. Richard Egan struck me as rather bland as an underwritten character.

In summary, above average but a better and potentially very good film was in there somewhere. 6/10

https://www.movieposter.com/poster/MPW-74557/Wicked_Woman.html

WICKED WOMAN, 1953

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Viewed at Seattle Film Noir Festival, July 2008. Lang's "Scarlett Street" with Joan Bennett and Edward G, which preceded this on the final day, is a thinking man's psychodrama but its inclusion in noir is open to question — which doesn't mean I didn't enjoy the hell out of it — however, to me it was only a warm-up for the main shot of the entire Seattle NOIR festival, "Wicked Woman", (United Artists, 1953, 77 supercharged minutes) which closed the whole week out in a blaze of a-moral blackness, with slim, towering, platinum-blonde bomb shell, Beverly Michaels (aptly described in the notes as "a stick of female Dynamite"), simply chewing up the scenery and everyone else in sight — male or female! This supreme noir actress makes Joan Bennett look like a girl scout by comparison. The minute she steps off that Greyhound in the opening scene we know we're in for trouble. When she checks into a ratty rooming house with strictly low-life denizens it already starts, fighting over the use of the bathroom, and especially with the runty bald creep across the hall, the inimitable fidgety, pudgy, balding slime-ball, Percy Helton. When she quickly saunters into a job as a barmaid it doesn't take her five minutes to vamp on the handsome bar owner (Richard Egan) and snare him in her web before the bleary eyes of his alcoholic wife. (Shades of "Postman always Rings Twice" in reverse). Soon she's got him talked into selling the place (and she'll have to pretend to be the wife and forge her signature to pull this off), ditching the wife and running off with her to Mexico.

"RUNT RUNT RUNT!!!

When Percy next door overhears her plotting and tries to blackmail her into having sex with him, she, towering over him by half a torso, disdainfully calls him a "runt", to which he indignantly retorts, "Don't you dare call me runt" — whereupon she literally explodes with the words; "RUNT, RUNT, RUNT !!!" — possibly the most egregious put-down ever seen on a silver screen. And the way she wipes her hand off on her nightgown after it has been greedily pawed by Percy is sheer noir genius. However, she does spend the night with him to shut him up … talk about unscrupulous! Although nobody actually gets killed in this film, it feels as though everybody is getting killed all the time, and the tension in the lawyer's office signing the bill of sale for the bar is so thick you can cut it with a knife. Though posing as Egan's wife she isn't wearing a ring and we can see that, but the lawyer and buyer are so bowled over by her looks they fail to notice — Excellent direction here by Russell Rouse who also penned the bare bones perfect screenplay with one of Occam's razors.

The reason I call this "pure" noir is that it pulls absolutely no punches, has the perfect no-name cast, the perfectly compact scenario, the absolute absence of anything resembling any kind of morality, and performances so perfect it looks like the actors just walked in off the street and started making the story up as they went along. As for Beverly Michaels … this is the Scarlett O'Hara of Noir. After seeing "Framed", in which Janis Carter so heartlessly drags Glen Ford down the drain, I nominated her for the all-time Best Actress Oscar of Noir Award. Now, after "Wicked Woman" I must respectfully ask Janis to move over to make some room for Beverly — as the best beyond-acting actress and the Wickedest Woman of All-Noir-time. Let's make that a "Lifetime Award" for Michaels as she is rumored to be still around, hiding out somewhere in Arizona. When she got back onto that Greyhound at the end of "Wicked Woman" with just enough cash to get halfway to nowhere on a one-way ticket, you just knew she would start vamping all over again the minute she got there. She actually starts right on the bus revealing a long well-turned leg to a scruffy salivating male passenger across the aisle …

Too bad they didn't make any sequels; "Wicked Woman" II, "Wicked Woman III", or "Wicked Woman Rides Again" — What a waste of wickedness! — and Percy Helton gets the all-time Slimeball Award. Even though he oozes oil from every pore and rubs his hands together like a house-fly perched on a sugar cube, he does so with such practiced aplomb that you can't help loving him for trying every ploy in the book just to get into Beverly's hot pants once. Richard Egan was the letter-perfect noir leading man because, while handsome enough and virile enough to be an "A' movie lead, he was much too wooden and transparent an actor to make the "A' list — in films of this kind, however, with no high-art pretensions — made to order. "Wicked Woman" (along with DOA, 1950) is the letter-perfect film noir down to the last 't' -- the kind where the addition or subtraction of a single frame would lessen the impact. Numerous thumbs up! (Incidentally, WW is so obscure it even listed in MALTIN)

MY personal awards: FILM: Best Noir ever. ACTRESS: Michaels, Best cheap tramp vamp ever, SUPPORTING Actor: Percy Helton, sleaziest cheap slime-ball of all time.

Beverly Michaels was definitely an excellent actress, at least for this kind of role, I mean noir dramas, and not necessarily crime rough films. Here, this is a true interesting drama directed by Russel Rouse who was a director whose films have always been worth to watch. The scheme is not that new of course and the plot, basic story, reminds a lot Hugo Haas' movies, involving wicked women, such as Cleo Moore or Marie Windsor in the lead characters. I am surprised that Beverly Michaels has not been hired for Hugo Haas movies. Just enjoy the first minutes of this drama, where Michaels arrive in town. This is purely juicy in terms of disguised eroticsm.

Beverly Michaels comes off like Gloria Grahame with a splash of Ann Savage's character in Detour. She exudes an airy, blue-collar charm that can quickly foment into a feisty, white-trashy pugnaciousness if provoked. As The Wicked Woman, she's a wonder to watch as she glides slinkily along the street, her long, lean, busty body sheathed in stark white. As she breezes off the bus and over to a low-rent rooming house, the viewer is wont to wonder just what swept such a stunner to these whereabouts. As the storyline unfolds at a slow, steadily deliberate pace, the audience observes her sleek-handed, worldly-wise reactions and can swiftly surmise a probable long-term pattern. She easily wins over many in her sway, like the lascivious gnome next door, the boozing boss and her handsome bartender husband, the habitual barflies. Those with whom she clashes, such as her fishwifey landlady and fault-finding fellow roomers, discover an opponent worth her salt. The plot is low-key and credible, and old hands like the irreplaceable Percy Helton make it reminiscent of fifties television anthologies. The film succeeds in what it was intended to be: a low-budget but well directed and acted character study of a beautiful, manipulative woman.

I appear to be here the only Brit. who has reviewed this 'B' film noir picture.This was the first time I had seen "The Wicked Woman" (1953), mainly because it only appears on YouTube.com and I was immediately struck by the similarity to the plot of my captioned summary title.Instead of drifter John Garfield seducing the owner's wife Lana Turner at a diner, we have a female drifter, Beverly Michaels (Billie Nash), seducing co-owner Richard Egan (Matt Bannister) who in like fashion attempts to fraudulently lure the owner away from his spouse and business.In the cuckold role instead of Cecil Kellaway, we have Evelyn Scott (Dora Bannister)as the other co-owner who likes the booze too much.I have seen the diminutive Percy Helton playing character roles several times in 50s films and here he plays a creepy character who gets to know too much of the lovers evil plot by creeping around dark alleys and such like.

The plot of "The Wicked Woman" is not as dark as my summary title and the "trouble & strife" appears to forgive her errant husband at the end of the film, whilst Billie Nash moves onto Kansas for her next fraudulent conquest.I was relieved the moral code did not kick in at the end with its predictable end for malefactors and it was this element which retained my interest.I rated it 6/10.