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While innocently driving down a road one night, someone throws a bag
into the car of Jane (Lizabeth Scott) and Alan (Arthur Kennedy), and the
bag contains money, and lots of it. Then, another car is following them,
but they can shake it. Once thinking about it, Alan wants to immediately
hand the money over to the police. But Jane figures it was to be used in a
blackmail scheme and is therefore dirty money (because why else would you
throw a bag of money into another car, so she wants to keep it.
At the end of the day, the two come up with a compromise ... they put
the bag of money to the luggage disposal at the train station and wait for
a week, to have enough time to think about it and to see if anyone comes
looking for the money.
But while Alan has his mind already made up, Jane - who was always
after money first and had actually married her first husband because of
his money - desperately wants to cling to the money, and even starts
spending some ... when one day a man, Danny Fuller (Dan Duryea) knocks on
her door and wants the money back - turns out the money really was from a
blackmail attempt, with Danny being the blackmailer. First, she can shake
Danny, but when she finds out that her husband is unwilling to leave her
the money just like that, she makes him part of her plan to kill Alan -
quite to his surprise, because he didn't want to be a part in murder ...
but by now Jane has him in her hand.
Soon she cooks up a story about her husband having gone off to Mexico
with another woman and she is the poor left wife - and she would have
gotten through with it too, if it wasn't for her sister-in-law Kathy
(Kristine Miller), who thinks she knows her brother better than leaving
his wife just like that, and for Don Blake (Don De Fore), a man who claims
to be Alan's army buddy come for a visit, but who seems to know much more
than he admits too ... and somehow, Kathy and Blake end up with the ticket
for the luggage disposal.
In the end though, Jane can get the ticket from Blake at gunpoint, and
she kills Danny using the poison he himself has bought for her to kill
Kathy. And with the money, Jane makes off to Mexico, to enjoy the high
life ... until she meets Blake again, who pretends to blackmail her, but
actually only wants to find out where she has hidden the body of Alan -
which she stupidly tells him. Then Blake drops his mask and turns out to
be the borhter of Jane's first husband, whom he believes she has killed
too, and now he has cooked up a plot to have her arrested by the Mexican
police as a sort of vendetta - but when trying to escape, she falls out
the window of her hotel room to her death.
A largely forgotten film noir ... that's actually much too good to be
forgotten: Lizabeth Scott and Dan Duryea as femme fatale
and small-time crook into things over his head respectively are just
excellent, the story is as immoral as film noir can get, and the direction
leaves scarcely a dull moment.
Highest recommendation !!!
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