Margo (Faith Domergue) is the wife of Frederick Lannington (Claude Rains), an apparently sadistic elderly millionaire. Jeff Cameron (Robert Mitchum) is a man who falls in love with Margo when she was brought into a hospital after attempting suicide. He becomes romantically involved with her without knowing that she’s married.
During a drunken confrontation with the jealous Frederick, the young doctor knocks the older man out and stumbles out of the room. When Jeff returns, he discovers that the man he hit is dead. Margo had smothered her husband during Cameron’s absence, but she instead tells Jeff that he is the killer. The lovers flee to Mexico, where Jeff finally figures out that his crazy female companion is the real killer. —wikipedia
John Villiers Farrow, CBE (10 February 1904 – 27 January 1963) was an Australian, later American, film director, producer and screenwriter. In 1957 he won the Academy Award for Best Writing / Best Screenplay for Around the World in Eighty Days and in 1942 he was nominated as Best Director for Wake Island.
Farrow was born in Sydney, Australia, the son of Lucy Villiers (née Savage), a dressmaker, and Joseph Farrow, a tailor’s trimmer. Farrow began writing while working as a sailor in the 1920s. He moved to Hollywood to work in films as a marine technical advisor and stayed on as a screenwriter. He wrote for films between 1927 and 1959, and also directed between 1934 and 1959. Farrow was also a writer of short stories and plays (Laughter Ends), as well as non-fiction (Pageant of the Popes, and biographies of St Thomas More and Father Damien).
He was married to actress Maureen O’Sullivan from 12 September 1936 until his death. He fathered four daughters: actresses Mia, Prudence… read more
Routine noir enlivened by the presence of Robert Mitchum and Claude Rains but hamstrung by an ending that is too silly for words.
Stylish film noir suffers from a number of credibility-stretching plot contrivances, but a tense, palpable atmosphere of seedy paranoia sees it through. Robert Mitchum offers his patented cool in the lead, with Faith Domergue appropriately unstable as the femme fatale; though Claud Rains is relegated to a brief, though pivotal, cameo. It has its flaws, but there's a lot for noir fans to appreciate.
