The Scarlet Hour

“Don’t try to brush me off. When I stick, I stick hard.” This tenacious attitude held by Pauline “Paulie” Nevins (Carol Ohmart) in Michael Curtiz’s The Scarlet Hour applies not only toward her current lover but toward her goal of financial independence from her husband, real estate magnate Ralph Nevins (James Gregory). She pursues both of these interests — men and money — in the form of E.V. Marshall (Tom Tryon), the head of sales for her husband’s company with whom she’s having an affair. When the extramarital couple overhear two men plotting the robbery of a local mansion, Paulie begins spinning a web in her mind: she’ll coax Marshall into robbing the robbers as they leave the scene so the two of them can run away and live off the proceeds. Not unexpectedly, things take a deadly turn. The film is no masterpiece, but the story is compelling if not totally believable, and Curtiz gives us noir visual style in plenty of scenes (eavesdropping in the woods, smoking in the bedroom, trapped in the garage). Ohmart is remarkably sultry, her voice like candy dripping with sex (Paramount was attempting to make her a star of Marilyn Monroe caliber, but the effort failed), her character seemingly drawn toward danger and excitement (“I’m scared silly. But it’s a funny kind of scared. I think I’m actually enjoying it”). Elaine Stritch appears in a thankless role as the friend whose acerbic wit compensates for her boring life, and the one and only Nat King Cole is on hand to sing “Never Let Me Go” on a nightclub stage.