Fortune is a Woman (1957)

Director: Sidney Gilliat
Writers: Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, adapted by Val Valentine from the novel by Winston Graham
Stars: Jack Hawkins, Arlene Dahl, Dennis Price, Violet Farebrother and Ian Hunter

Index: 2025 Centennials.

In many ways, this is a quintessential British film, but I’m watching it for an American, as Arlene Dahl would have been a hundred years old today. The next most prominent woman in the cast, Greta Gynt, was Norwegian, but made her career in British film. Dahl didn’t. She only made two films in the UK, Wicked as They Come in 1956 and this a year later.

Otherwise, the names are all British. Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, a famous team in a slew of genres, wrote the script. Launder took the director’s role for comedies but Gilliat for dramas like this and he did here. Jack Hawkins is the star, with other old faithfuls like Dennis Price, Bernard Miles, Geoffrey Keen and even a young Christopher Lee lower down the cast. It was based on a novel by Winston Graham, best known for his Poldark historical series.

I should emphasise that it’s a mystery, as it’s keen to start out like a horror movie. We chase through the countryside to an old dark house, then zoom inside in horror fashion to focus on a painting of the very same house. We zoom in there too and there’s a dead man’s hand. It’s a nightmare sequence, being suffered by Oliver Branwell, an insurance investigator.

The house is Lowis Manor and, in flashback, he’s sent there via Lloyds of London, to look at a potential fraud claim. He’s met by Price, as a gentleman named Tracey Moreton, who has a perfectly good explanation for everything. He plugged in an electric fire and his wife opened a window and then flames were licking at his art collection. They doused it quickly but it got to the Bonnington first. That’s a landscape his grandfather commissioned in 1882 to feature the house. Yes, it’s the one in the nightmare.

In keeping with the tone of horror, the elder Mrs. Moreton emerges from the shadows, but the new Mrs. Moreton merely turns round. It’s Arlene Dahl, young, vibrant and American and clearly known to Oliver. It doesn’t take long to find out that they were an item in Hong Kong but she walked out on him and that still hurts.

Fast forward, as we do in fits and starts, and this obviously fair insurance claim seems less fair. Oliver has been assigned a different case, of Charles Highbury, the Singing Miner, a film actor who thinks he needs a month off after a blackout, a choice that would seriously impact a film in production. Oliver follows a trail to a concerned lady, Vera Litchen, who boasts the very same painting on her wall, even though it had been destroyed in the Lowis Manor fire.

He thinks fraud so starts to dig but when he breaks into the house while the Moretons are away, he finds something even darker. There’s Tracey Moreton’s corpse and every detail of a textbook insurance fraud that he told Sarah a little while earlier in passing conversation: the burning cigarette, carefully draped rags, even the candle in the basement. He can’t stop the fire so the whole house burns and Tracey’s body burns with it.

Of course, we immediately suspect Sarah at this point, not least because the American title of the film is She Played with Fire. She’ll inherit everything too, once the insurance comes in, so she’s the obvious suspect.

Oliver, on the other hand, can’t believe that she would do such a thing so she must have let slip those details to her husband and he tried the fraud, accidentally falling to his death in the process. And so Oliver makes every stupid decision possible to make himself seem guilty, right down to marrying Sarah in a heartbeat. Not deliberately, I should add. Just stupidly.

Suddenly there are a slew of plot strands in play, weaving tighter and tighter around each other. Oliver tries to figure out the fraud, even as others start to believe he did it with his new wife. That’s not just police, but a blackmailer too who wants half their insurance money. On honeymoon, they receive Tracey’s ring in the mail, which he never took off and which was on his finger when he died. It’s a tangled web.

The plotting is intricate, perhaps too much so at the expense of the characters, who come and go without us caring too much. Frankly, it feels more interesting to see Lloyds of London in action than to follow every detailed step of the trail. Fortunately, the longer the film runs, the more I cared about what was happening.

Hawkins is reliably strong as an honourable man caught up in a mess by his own stupidity. Dahl is good as the wife of two characters and a fish out of water throughout. Everybody else is from a shared heritage, whatever class, job or intention, but she’s not from around here, as it were, so always feels apart. It gives Dahl a good chance to be either behind everything or blissfully uninvolved in anything and she has fun with that freedom.

She had a strong film career, building on an early passion for drama both in and after high school, but she arguably became better known later in life for other pursuits.

While her first jobs were in modelling, that led to a New York musical, which led to a play, which led to Hollywood, which led, by twenty-two, to a long term MGM contract.

At MGM she played support in The Bride Goes Wild, then the lead in A Southern Yankee, with Red Skelton. While she shone in musicals and comedies, she also made thrillers, like Reign of Terror and Scene of the Crime, and westerns, like Ambush and The Outriders. Not all of these were successful so she found herself working for a variety of other studios in a variety of genres.

It was on a period drama called Sangaree for Paramount that she met her second husband, actor Fernando Lamas, with whom she also co-starred in The Diamond Queen and a barrage of TV shows. Her final film, Night of the Warrior in 1991, was with their son, Lorenzo Lamas.

She kept working during her first marriage to actor Lex Barker, but she wound down her career during her second, her last notable role at that time being 1959’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, arguably her most famous film.

They divorced in 1960 but she still had four husbands to go: an oilman and heir to a yeast fortune; a Russian wine writer; a TV producer and yacht broker; and a packaging designer. She continued to take film and television roles here and there but moved more into business. She wrote a beauty column, invented the Dahl sleeping cap and directed beauty products at Sears Roebuck. In the eighties, she moved into astrology with a syndicated column and later a premium phoneline.

She died at home in 2021 at ninety-six.