Ed-Shullivan This is a black and white film noir that focuses on a relationship between two wartime buddies. Matt Jameson (played by Jeffrey Hunter) is a true war hero who risked his own life to save Vince Biskay (played by David Janssen) who was lying wounded on a beachfront with his hand partially shot off. Vince promises his hero Matt that if they make it back to the U.S.A. and if he ever gets rich he will split his wealth with his savior Matt 50/50. The two wartime buddies do make it back after the war is over and our hero Matt marries his bosses daughter Nina Jameson (played by Stella Stevens). Over the next few years Matt realizes that his wife Nina is a tramp who drinks all day long and sleeps around on him. Matt also comes to realize that his father-in-law encouraged Matt marry his daughter Nina so that he and his daughter could bask in her marrying a true war hero. Unfortunately both Nina and her father are unscrupulous users of anyone and everyone, especially when it comes to using and abusing Matt.Now Matt has fallen for his secretary Liz Addams (played by Elaine Devry) but because his wife has put him into so much debt with her reckless spending and non-stop boozing Matt believes he is stuck in a loveless marriage with his father-in-law hanging his unpaid debt to him over his head to stay in his loveless marriage.In walks Matt's old wartime buddy Vince Biskay with a questionable scheme that will make the two wartime buddies a half million dollars each for just a couple of hours work by picking up a diplomat at the airport who happens to be carrying a steel suitcase with $3.5 million dollars. Now Matt has his reservations about getting involved with his buddy Vince and his plan but Vince assures him it is on the up and up and there will be no gun play. Matt's girlfriend Liz Addams pleads with Matt not to proceed with the plan and just leave the city with her although Matt is broke but with his dignity still intact.Matt decides out of desperation in Vince's plan that will see him be financially stable enough to leave his wife Nina and move on with a new life with his girlfriend Liz. The film does get very interesting in the latter half of the story and the audience will be able to guess what happens next, but it is not easy to predict what happens to the four main characters in this story. Two characters who are nothing but users and liars, Nina and Vince, and two characters with a moral compass that knows right from wrong in Matt and Liz.There are twists and turns in this film to keep your attention in this film noir classic. I do wish it would have provided a more enticing and suspenseful musical score but sometimes we can't have it all. I give it a 7 out of 10 rating.

GUENOT PHILIPPE I watched this film for the second time yesterday. In LBX, this time, and not in f...pan and scan. Well, it begins like a film noir, an authentic one, with a beautiful jazzy score, as we saw so much in the early sixties, and curiously ends like a pure drama. Of course, it's not a masterpiece, far from that, but the overall film is rather an atmospheric noir from this very period. In some points, it looks like Burt Kennedy's MONEY TRAP, starring Glenn Ford and Ricardo Montalban, adapted from a Lionel White. MAN-TRAP is from a John Mac Donald's one. I confound both of these two films. I guess that was probably one of the last movies David Janssen made for the big screen, before GREEN BERETS, and his twenty years life for TV industry.

MartinHafer The main reason I watched this film is that is was co-produced and directed by Edmond O'Brien--one of my favorite film noir actors. Also, while I can't prove it, I think he dubbed the voice of the photographer late in the film. Unfortunately, while this is a noir film, it's not nearly as good as any in which O'Brien himself appeared.As far as the film goes, it's a very strange melange of several plots--and I think one or two would have made a good film--but not ALL of them. First, Jeffery Hunter is married to Stella Stevens. She is a NASTY person--a drunk and quite histrionic. She will say and do anything to gain attention and often claims that Hunter is an abusive husband--even though he clearly is the abused spouse. In fact, he's been pretty much emasculated by this horrid woman. This is an interesting plot. Second, after putting up with all this abuse, Hunter finds a girlfriend and they talk about his getting a divorce. In the meantime, Stevens accidentally dies and since she's always claiming he abuses her, he panics and buries her! Third, when the film begins you see Hunter save a buddy (David Janssen) during the Korean War. Years later, Janssen approaches Hunter with a scheme to get rich robbing some evil South American strong-man. Janssen is shot in the process and later, when being nursed back to health in Hunter's home, Janssen is caught making out with Stevens!! Later, Janssen runs away to Mexico while the South American dictator's men catch up with Hunter and deliver a beating. Inexplicably, one of the toughs INSTANTLY diagnoses Hunter as now having amnesia from an injury in the war AND they just triggered it with the beating!! And, further beatings wouldn't help...so they leave him...alive!!! There's even more to the film than this (including a wife-swapping club attended by the neighbors--one of whom is, ironically, Bob Crane) but none of it works. It's like many different plot threads that are just haphazardly tossed together. None of it makes a lot of sense and the film just came off as second or third-rate.

dougbrode There are a few distinctions to this film, one being that it is the only movie ever to have been directed by Edmond O'Brien, the 1940s leading man who, a decade later, put on a great deal of weight and turned into a top character actor, even winning a Best Supporting Actor Oscar. Once was enough as a director, though, for this crime thriller appears to be an imitation of the film noirs that O'Brien starred in (most notably, D.O.A.) earlier in his career, and that genre had all but disappeared from the screen by the early 1960s, only to be revived again toward the end of the century and at the beginning of the next, via neo-noir - which even included a disastrous remake of DOA with Dennis Quaid. But I digress . . . one of the other distinctions is the re-teaming of Jeffrey Hunter and David Janssen, who had worked together very well a year and a half earlier in a far better and more ambitious film, Hell to Eternity, a big scale WWII action flick. In between, Hunter had played the part of Jesus in King of Kings and, after that, he seemed desperate to do anything to try and distance himself from the image of purity he incarnated there. That included second rate 'programmers' (as studio B movies used to be called) in which, at the very least, he could remind audiences of the differing roles he was capable of playing. Hunter blew his last big chance for success, incidentally, when a few years later he listened to the lady in his life when she told him NOT to do Star Trek! Anyway, the third reason to take a look at this flick (don't go out of your way, mind you) is to catch Stella Stevens displaying her range of talents and reminding us that, in addition to a ditzy-glitzy blonde in comedy roles, she could do a femme fatale just fine. She may have third billing behind the boys, but this is her show all the way, and whenever she's on screen, sparks fly - as they do nowhere else in this minor movie.