Mon 13 Feb 2012
THE SCARLET HOUR. Paramount Pictures, 1956. Carol Ohmart, Tom Tryon, Jody Lawrance, James Gregory, Elaine Stritch, E.G. Marshall, Edward Binns, Scott Marlowe, Billy Gray, David Lewis, Nat “King†Cole. Director: Michael Curtiz.
Sometimes you have to sift through a lot of Fool’s Gold as you make your way through a stack of would-be Film Noir movies on DVD before you find a true nugget, the Real Thing, and this movie is it.
Apparently it’s all but unknown. Right now there’s been only one person who’s left a comment about it on IMDB (and his opinion is the same as mine – “a small gemâ€), and no links to external reviews (until this one shows up there).
The basic plot line sounds like The Postman Always Rings Twice, but (a) there are a lot of variations possible on that particular theme, and this film has them, and (b) as much as I’d like to say otherwise, it’s almost but not quite in that league.
Carol Ohmart, for example, as the femme fatale, whom Tom Tryon’s character has fallen in love with, has nowhere near the screen presence of Lana Turner, even on the latter’s worse days and Miss Ohmart’s best.
In The Scarlet Hour the latter’s role is a little too tough and hardbitten if you were to compare her to Miss Turner in Postman, but to her credit, she does manage to get the impossibly handsome Mr. Tryon to fall in love with her.
Even if she already has a husband. Tom Tryon works for the man (James Gregory), a real estate kind of guy; Tryon’s his top salesman. And neither Ohmart and Tryon have murder on their mind; all they need is the money to run away together.
Enter a gang of crooks they overhear casing a house. A third of a million dollars; worth of jewels sounds good to them, and hijacking the burglars’ loot after they’ve cracked the safe sounds easy and all but foolproof.
We know better. Plans like this seldom work out as planned. The husband gets suspicious, for one thing, and suspicious husbands always put rocks in the crankcase.
We (the viewer) easily find ourselves anticipating a couple of the more immediate outcomes, but probably not the third (speaking for myself, that is).
There is a fourth important player in the game, which I almost forgot to tell you about, and that is Mr. Tryon’s secretary (Jody Lawrance), who is – but more I will not tell.
The ending of The Scarlet Hour is also nowhere near as memorable as that of Postman, but it’s nearly as good, and it certainly is as inevitable. Beside my recommendation as spelled out so far, you also get a bonus of Nat “King†Cole singing a song in a nightclub. I’m not sure the plot required a singer in a nightclub, but singers in nightclubs appear in lots of noir films, and this he’s the one in this one. (It was also David Lewis’s film debut, for whatever that particular fact may be worth to you.)
February 14th, 2012 at 6:29 pm
Steve,
I’m being lazy, but is this available on the legit market? Sounds too good not to order ASAP!
February 14th, 2012 at 7:01 pm
No, there’s been no official release, but it’s not too hard to find in the collector-to-collector market.
I haven’t checked to see what the usual books on Film Noir have said about it, but I have found one online review that if anything praises it more than I have:
http://www.filmnoirfoundation.org/TheScarletHour.pdf
It’s described there as “The Last ‘Classic Film Noir.'”
I think the author misses a lot of good noir films in between, but according to him, THE SCARLET HOUR closes an arc of the noir cycle that wouldn’t begin again until BODY HEAT in 1984.
That’s quite a claim.
February 15th, 2012 at 4:06 am
Thanks Steve, sounds really fascinating.
I watched this a really long time ago and wish I could remember more as it seems such an unlikely combination of the breezy comedic skills of writer Frank Tashlin and the visual panache of Michael Curtiz, always my favourite of the great studio directors. I used to have a VHS of it somewhere but now I can remember virtually nothing about it – I’ll have to go rummaging in my loft and see what I can find!
It’ll drive me crazy now if I can’t find it – thanks (I think).
Sergio
February 15th, 2012 at 11:08 am
Sergio:
I hope you find your copy! This movie seems to really have fallen into the cracks, and with a director at the helm as well known as Michael Curtiz, it only makes you wonder why all the more.
February 16th, 2012 at 3:40 pm
Some of these people have interesting personal stories. Carol Ohmart is alive. Last I heard living in Washington state. Might be of interest if someone followed her for a bit. Tom Tryon also interesting for the career choices he made and made for him.
February 17th, 2012 at 6:51 pm
There is an online interview with Carol Ohmart done in 1989 that probably says it all about her career:
http://articles.latimes.com/1989-01-08/entertainment/ca-255_1_carol-ohmart
Not a particularly happy story. If she was born in 1927, as the records say, she’ll be 87 this year.
One online biography of Tom Tryon can be found here:
http://www.meredy.com/tomtryon/biography.html
but to me, it tries to cover too much in too short a space.
March 21st, 2012 at 3:10 am
Steve,
I think THE SCARLET HOUR is more modeled on DOUBLE INDEMNITY than on THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE, though those two films (and novels) have some basic similarities. Possibly it tries too hard to encompass both books all at once, which makes the film too plot-heavy. Carol Ohmart was asked to do an awful lot in the film–more, in fact, than Turner or Stanwyck in their earlier roles.
Also, I get the sense that you may be misinterpreting Gary Deane’s claim in his FNF article about the film. He’s pretty clear in his opening that the classic noir cycle “ended” with a series of films that strongly moved away from the classic plot/character conventions–cf. TOUCH OF EVIL and ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW. Change was in the air with respect to crime films, and I think he has a valid point that THE SCARLET HOUR was the last attempt to make a “classic” noir with a femme fatale at the center of things, using all of the usual noir characteristics. I also don’t think he’s unilaterally praising the film.
It’s good to see someone else writing about it, as it’s sufficiently entertaining to warrant more exposure–if only for the great performances from Elaine Stritch and Billy Gray (the OTHER Billy Gray, not the child actor…)–who provide some convulsive comic relief as a wife-and-husband whose love is 100 proof.
March 21st, 2012 at 9:27 am
Hi Don
You (and several others) are probably right about SCARLET NIGHT resembling DOUBLE INDEMNITY more than POSTMAN, but it was POSTMAN that stuck in my mind all the way through.
I appreciate your clarification of Gary Deane’s point. I was too brief in my comment above. My instinct at the time I left that comment was that 1956 was too early for the first cycle of noir films to have ended, but it’s a thought worth following up on. You’re right (and so is he) that TOUCH OF EVIL, PSYCHO and others that came afterward were the start of something new in terms of making noir films.
By saying I thought he liked the film more than I, I did not mean to suggest he was unilaterally praising it. I should have been clearer on this. By no means is SCARLET HOUR a perfect film, but it is one that’s fun and enjoyable to watch, all the way through. Right now, several months after writing up my first impressions, I’m convinced it’s time to take a second look at it.
In fact, I envy anyone who happens to see SCARLET HOUR the first time, like me, without warning. What a pleasant surprise there’ll be in store for them!
— Steve
November 4th, 2014 at 10:43 am
The Scarlet Hour (1956) played recently on British Sky Broadcasting and has been uploaded to http://www.kickass.to with a running time of 90 minutes. The nightclub song ‘Never Let Me Go’ sung by Nat King Cole is still there and the opening and closing credits are intact. Am just about to watch this new guilty pleasure! Richard, New Zealand
September 21st, 2015 at 10:26 am
I just discovered this movie after having been searching for it for years, and have put my own review up on IMDB. For some reason, I do not think that Elaine Stritch ever acknowledged this movie; She claims that her first film was “A Farewell to Arms” (and leaves it at that), also not acknowledging “Three Violent Men”. As for David Lewis, he is best known to me for “General Hospital”, winning an Emmy as the original Edward Quartermain (“Making money prevents my arteries from hardening”, his character once said) and also very prevalent in “The Apartment”, “Batman” and a stinker of a comedy called “John Goldfarb Please Come Home!”. As a fan of his from “GH’s”, I was delighted to find him in this, and as a fan of Elaine’s, anything with her (well maybe not “Sidelong Glances of a Pigeon Kicker”) is worth it. She threatened to steal every scene here as she did in the very difficult to find “Who Killed Teddy Bear?”
January 30th, 2019 at 12:02 am
It’s showing tomorrow at the San Francisco Noir Festival at the Castro Theater.
October 15th, 2019 at 12:43 am
The Scarlet Hour has a flat, cheap, downbeat quality that makes it realistic.