Alex da Silva
Killer Zachary Scott (Ronnie) romances women, kills them and takes their money. So watch out Faye Emerson (Hilda) and sister Mona Freeman (Anne) because he's just moved in to the spare room of your house. And you are both in his sights.Scott is excellent as the psychopath who has no empathy or feelings towards his victims. He is charming and totally evil. All the cast do well but Mona Freeman's personality changes are a bit unbelievable and the shy, indecisiveness of doctor Bruce Bennett (Andrew) is pretty annoying.The film keeps going without any lulls up until its sudden ending which could have better. Up to that point, though, it's good and Scott seems to be in complete control of his scheme
until Emerson fights back with some psychological torture of her own.
wmss
I won't summarize the plot,as several others have done this already. Just two things: Yes,the ending seemed tacked on,like the writer couldn't think of a way to end the picture and just threw this together at the last minute. The other thing is that several posters are under the impression that Zachary Scott did Mildred Pierce first. No,this film came first,two years before Mildred Pierce,in fact. The Monty Berrigon character Scott played in that film is almost a carbon copy of the guy in this film,not the other way around. In fact,I wonder why Scott would agree to play the MP character since it was so close to this one. Maybe he wanted to work with Joan Crawford or maybe ,under the terms of his contract, he had to play anything they told him to. At any rate,he played these sleazy scoundrels well
bob.decker
This isn't a particularly good movie but it's worth watching as a measure of what RKO achieved the same year with "Born to Kill." In both pictures, poorer, older sister falls for a homicidal heel, brings him into the family home only to be dumped in favor of her richer, younger sister. Now her challenge becomes how to protect little sis from the big lug. In this rather sappy G-rated version of the story, most of the noirish elements that made "Born to Kill" great are missing; what makes it watchable is the transformation of Faye Emerson, who, like Tilda Swindon in "The Deep End," gets sexier and sexier the more she's in danger, completing the beauty arc from bespectacled stenographer to leggy siren in under 90 minutes.
RanchoTuVu
Zachary Scott plays a womanizing writer who, as the film is opening, is removing a wedding ring from the finger of a woman who is lying in a bed in a hotel room. That she doesn't wake up tells you something. The story is fairly involved with minimal intrusion by law enforcement. It plays itself out between Scott and the woman he thinks will be his next push-over, an LA stenographer played by Faye Emmerson. While the audience is expecting the worst from Scott, it's Emmerson whose character eventually goes beyond what one would expect of it. Scott's traipsing around LA and looking for a room to rent is fairly riveting and when he sees Emmerson trying to take down the "Room For Rent" sign from her nice middle class two story wood house, the story is set. Suave ruthless womanizer meets lonely stenographer who lives with her mother and easily (maybe too easily) wins them both over. And later comes the arrival of the younger and prettier sister (Mona Freeman), which pretty much sets the stage and opens a lot of possibilities. Scott himself is at his ruthless best.
AD
