My own all-time schlock favorite, particularly when pig-like Percy Helton is running his slobbering lips up the arm of wonderfully lurid Beverly Michaels.
--Andrew Sarris on Wicked Woman
Wicked Woman is an impressive portrait of the underbelly of America, full of sluts and perverts, dipsos and blackmailers, who live in furnished rooms with a bathroom and payphone in the hall. It stars Beverly Michaels, who only made eleven movies, but dominated them all with her statuesque body, big eyes, and moods that could switch from sweet to ferocious in a second. The film represents a few weeks in Michaels' life, as she gets off a Greyhound at the beginning and leaves at the end with a bus that will take her as far as she can afford for twenty-nine dollars.
While Michaels is in town she tries to convince bar owner Richard Egan (from The Revolt of Mamie Stover, which I wrote about yesterday) to sell the bar (half-owned by Egan's alcoholic wife, Evelyn Scott, whose signature Michaels offers to forge). Egan can't resist Michaels and agrees, until he finds Percy Helton kissing Michaels -- which she had only agreed to do to stop Helton's extortion attempt after Helton found out about the fraud -- and a rooming house brawl ensues.
This is the first film cinematographer Eddie Fitzgerald filmed and he and Rouse capture -- with their low-budget and minimal sets -- all the desperation of small towns and small town bars. The film was written by Rouse and Clarence Greene, who had previously written the superb and fatalistic film noir D.O.A. (1949).
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