Best movie of this year hands down!

Powerful

It is a performances centric movie

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

As others have noted, the script is not well written.It's a good example of what can happen when a novelist adapts his own work for the screen. When it comes to editing, authors just hate having to kill their darlings, and so it was with Goodis leaving in those numerous dreadfully long monologues, which might be acceptable in a novel where the plot plays out in the reader's mind, but are inexcusable in a movie where the rule is 'show it, don't tell it'.Unless dialog moves the plot forward it needs to be excised.Goodis gave the director some real challenges, and what we end up with are characters not able to look at each other but instead stare without emotion while they babble on interminably about themselves, stopping the action dead.Otherwise the plot, apart from some logic holes, is a good one, and typical of Goodis.Casting is another problem for me. Mansfield's acting is simply atrocious. Durea is a fine performer but having to act like and say that his age is 36, when in fact he is and looks almost 50, jars.Peter Capell chews the scenery trying to depict Baylock.Stewart Bradley (Charlie) personifies evil. I enjoyed his performance. I think Goodis writes best when he's writing for the villain of the piece.

It coulda been a contender, but the sloppy direction ruined it. Duryea is good as the tormented soul keeping watch over Jayne Mansfield,in one of her signature "endowed" roles, as the kind hearted love-sick (for Duryea) e. She's dreadful. There are three in this crooks "organization" who steal a flashy emerald necklace from a dippy woman living in a mansion. Now, how do they dispose of it since it's so hot it will burn their hands if they touch it. Finally, after much drama and over-acting, they head for New Jersey to find Mansfield who is involved with some dude she met while on her back on the beach with her qualities showing "up". Dead cop, dead member of the organization, la dee dah, etc, etc. Finally Jayne and Dan end up on the boardwalk (I guess Atlantic City?) being pursued by her dude who happens to be a cop they know who is after the necklace, blah, blah, blah. Previously, the 2nd member of the organization gets beaten to death by the dude. The boardwalk scenes are corny and horribly directed. Jayne goes free, Duryea gets it in the back and front by about 27 bullets from the bad cop dude's six shooter, the real cops show up, the cop-dude is exposed and the movie ends. This was thrilling and exciting but so terribly directed it misses being very good, so, as it is, its OK. Would only recommend it because of the ever interesting Duryea. Incidentally: Martha Vicers who play the hot Carmen Sternwood in "The Big Sleep" eleven year earlier is equally hot in a pivotal role here also.

This is one of those extravagantly stylized late-period noirs, one which palpitates with flamboyant cinematic technique. It belongs in the same club as those other exaggerated, self-consciously arty noirs of the late 50s/early 60s, like Touch of Evil, Kiss Me Deadly, Blast of Silence and Sam Fuller's contemporaneous contributions to the genre. Wendkos directs like a recent A+ film school graduate showing off every Hitchcock and Welles trick he's learned -- there are many stunning edits (he is also credited as the film's editor), several strikingly composed shots, and a suitably seedy background (the fact that the crooks' hideout is right next to a railway line full of speeding streamliners is a boon). At the same time, he toes the studio line of narrative clarity and cohesive action scenes enough to make this suitable viewing for the non-buff (one can see why he spent most of his years in television, but at the same time could dazzle with over-the-top effects in The Mephisto Waltz.) Fans of Atlantic City's Steel Pier are in for a treat in the film's climax (which owes a bit too much to The Lady from Shanghai) -- we even get to see the diving horse. But notably, we also see the soggy marshes that border the city and reflect the protagonists' own situational quagmire. It may not have the integrity of the more subtly devastating noirs of the Siodmak 40s, but it has its own postmodern tradition to uphold. It's worth picking this one up even on the third-generation dupes that are now in circulation; a wide-screen dvd restoration is definitely in order.

I saw this film a long time ago and was tremendously impressed, almost hynotized, by its technique. It was directed by Paul Wendkos, who's since gone on to a successful career in television, but who was for a while considered an up and coming director of movies. The stars, Dan Duryea and Jayne Mansfield, never quite achieved the kind of success many had envisioned for them. Duryea's career was sidetracked by Richard Widmark, and Mansfield never replaced Marilyn Monroe. Part of the charm of this film is watching small timers play small timers in a small movie that didn't cost a lot of money and which few people saw or want to see because no one connected with it is famous (though Jayne has her fans I guess). To make matters worse, the film is arty, full of offbeat camera angles and strange lighting that sometimes makes people look startled, as if they're continually having their picture taken. It's a tawdry tale about little people with big problems, and it works. For all I know it could be a work of art. The story is mostly about a jewel robbery, but it's also about the strange, almost incestuous relationship between Dan and Jayne, which both does and doesn't have a whole lot to do with jewels. There is a very bad guy involved who comes across like a young Senator Joe McCarthy. There are scenes in an amusement park; and more scenes in an empty stadium. I'm not sure why. The films is dazzling and ambitious and pretentious, so much so that it's beyond mere film noir as such; it's more like art noir.