Smooth as Silk

With some low-budget B noirs the filmmakers seem not to be trying very hard (such films are excluded from this collection). This is not the case with Charles Barton’s Smooth as Silk, Universal’s compact crime yarn that punches above its weight across the board, especially in the juicy performance by Virginia Grey as a social-climbing narcissist who blithely disposes of human beings after acquiring from them whatever she needs. The film appears to switch leads midway through, the first half dominated by Paula Marlowe (Grey) as she schemes to land a role in the new Broadway play produced by the wealthy, influential Stephen Elliott (John Litel), which includes seducing him into a marriage proposal. The second half is dominated by another Paula admirer, successful attorney Mark Fenton (Kent Taylor), whose rejection by Paula in favor of the more useful Elliott sets him down a vengeful path of criminal plotting (“Life is sweeter to me than any woman is,” says Elliott later while pleading at gunpoint). Jane Adams plays Paula’s younger sister Susan, whose visit seems to have very little purpose to the story, and Milburn Stone is excellent as the depressed, dipsomaniac John Kimble whose only reprieve from alcohol addiction comes when he’s dating Paula (she’ll dump him, of course). The script would have benefited from a rewrite to sharpen rough edges and trim loose threads, but the film is quite solid technically, production design, cinematography, and lighting all working together to project a perfectly respectable noir specimen.