The Scarlet Hour (1956)

★ 5.1 1h 35m IMDb

Drama Thriller Crime

An unhappy wife uses her powers of manipulation to draw an infatuated man into an ill-fated jewelry heist.

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Carol Ohmart as Pauline 'Paulie' Nevins Died 2002 · Salt Lake City, Utah, USA Armelia Carol Ohmart, known professionally as Carol Ohmart, was an American actress and former model who appeared in numerous films and television series from the early 1950s until the 1970s. Over the...

Tom Tryon as E.V. 'Marsh' Marshall Died 1991 · Hartford, Connecticut, USA Thomas Lester Tryon (January 14, 1926 – September 4, 1991) was an American actor and novelist. Description above from the Wikipedia article Tom Tryon, licensed under CC-BY-SA,full list of contributor...

Jody Lawrance as Kathy Stevens Died 1986 · Fort Worth, Texas, USA As the 1950s began, Jody Lawrance (born Nona Josephine Goddard) showed much promise as a contract player for Columbia. In 1951 alone, she was the female lead in four features including "Ten Tall Men,"...

James Gregory as Ralph Nevins Died 2002 · Bronx, New York, USA James Gregory (December 23, 1911 – September 16, 2002) was an American actor. His best-known roles include Schaffer in Al Capone (1959), the McCarthy-like Sen. John Iselin in The Manchurian Candidate...

Elaine Stritch as Phyllis Rycker Died 2014 · Detroit, Michigan, USA Elaine Stritch (February 2, 1925 – July 17, 2014) was an American actress, singer, and comedienne, known for her work on Broadway and later, television. She made her professional stage debut in 1944 a...

E.G. Marshall as Lt. Jennings Died 1998 · Owatonna, Minnesota, USA Everett Eugene Grunz (June 18, 1914 – August 24, 1998), known professionally as E. G. Marshall, was an American actor, best known for his television roles as the lawyer Lawrence Preston on The Defende...

Director Michael Curtiz

Cast Carol Ohmart, Tom Tryon, Jody Lawrance, James Gregory, Elaine Stritch, E.G. Marshall, Edward Binns, David Lewis, Billy Gray, Jacques Aubuchon

John Chard 7/10 Jun 30, 2019

The Kiss Off.

The Scarlet Hour is directed by Micahel Curtiz and written by Rip Van Ronkel, Frank Tashlin and John Lucas. It stars Carol Ohmart, Tom Tryon, E.G. Marshall, Elaine Stritch, Jody Lawrance and James Gregory. Music is by Leith Stevens and cinematography by Lionel Lindon.

It has been a hard to locate film noir for may a year, which when you consider it's directed by such a titan of classic cinema comes as a surprise. The plot dynamics are very familiar to noir fans, and coming as it does late in the original film noir wave it does lack a bit of freshness, but there's little deviations in the shenanigans of the principals to at least give this its own identity.

We essentially have an abused wife (Ohmart) having an affair with one of her husbands (Gregory) employees (Tryon). They plan to run away together but need money to do so. As it happens, during one of their love sessions in a parked car they over hear crooks planning a jewelry robbery and she convinces her man to hold up the thieves so as to take the jewels for themselves. In true noirville form this becomes a road to nowhere and danger lurks on every corner, with dodgy alibis, unrequited passions and a few twists and turns to keep the narrative perky.

This is no shoddy production either, it comes out of Paramount and the presence of Curtiz shows you that the studio wasn't merely making a contract filler. Though the absence of chirascuro from Lindon is a shame, we do get some nifty sequences such as violence enacted that we only see via shadows. There's moments of humour as well, while there's also a musical surprise as Nat King Cole turns up to croon Never Let Me Go. Cast are fine, Ohmart has classic fatale looks and legs from heaven, but her character trajectory is a little muddled in the writing. Tryon plays the dupe competently, Lawrance sparkles in a secondary role, as does the scene stealing Stritch.

I'd stop at calling this a hidden gem, as some other amateur reviewers have, though it does rather depend on how many other similar noirs you have seen previously. This doesn't come close to Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice or Thérèse Raquin, but that doesn't stop it being a good film, because it is and for sure it's well worth noir fans tracking it down. 7/10