John Farrow's The Unholy Wife (1957)

The Unholy Wife is a strange, sometimes ponderous sometimes beautiful, film; it's an attempted film noir in color, after the film noir had run its course with Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly in 1955.  Australian-born director John Farrow had directed a number of rather impersonal films noirs (The Big Clock, 1948 and Where Danger Lives, 1950) and this is his penultimate film (he died in 1963 at the age of 58).  The Unholy Wife seems to be an attempt to move the film noir into the era of technicolor films, as Allan Dwan had started to do in 1956 with Slightly Scarlet, but things didn't quite jell:  British actress Diana Dors, method actor Rod Steiger, younger actor Tom Tryon and older actress Beulah Bondi seem to be in different worlds, with often mysterious motivations.  Add to this a priest, played by Arthus Franz, and some half-baked theology (Farrow was a Roman Catholic who had written books about popes and priests), a hard-boiled screenwriter for the film (Jonathan Latimer) and flashbacks within flashbacks and the results can be even more confusing than most films noirs.

Diana Dors, with her platinum blonde hair and her form-fitting suits in various colors (red, blue, pink) demonstrates an effective combination of sexuality and brains, ending up unrecognizable in prison with brown hair, streaked with gray, looking out a window one last time on her way to her execution for killing her mother-in-law, which she did not do (though she had killed her husband's business partner).  Dors leaves behind a young son whom Steiger (who had rescued Dors from a sordid life as a B-girl) adopts and begins to teach about grapes and the wine business that his immigrant grandfather had started.