The Scarlet Hour (1956)

Director: Michael Curtiz
Writers: Rip Van Ronkel, Frank Tashlin and John Meredyth Lucas, based on a story by Rip Van Ronkel and Frank Tashlin
Stars: Carol Ohmart, Tom Tryon and Jody Lawrance

Index: Centennials.

The poster states “starring” Carol Ohmart, Tom Tryon and Jody Lawrance, but the movie itself chooses “introducing”. It started Ohmart and Tryon’s careers and restarted Lawrance’s. I’m watching for Tryon, today’s centenarian, but should note that this film, unusually, only began the first of his two careers in film.

This first, rather traditionally, is as an actor, initially in a rather passive role utterly under the control of Ohmart’s character, but finding his way out as the film runs along. He’s Marsh, E. V. Marshal, Sales Manager at the Nevins real estate company. Ohmart plays Paulie, or Mrs. Pauline Nevins. Yes, Marshal’s boss’s wife. His much younger trophy wife.

They start out on Lover’s Lane, hiding from anyone else who might venture up there, thus speaking volumes about their relationship. In fact, they’re secreted among the bushes when a gentleman explains the details of a robbery to two men that he’s hired to commit it.

Marsh is happy to get away, but Paulie sees dollar signs. As she tells him soon after, it’s OK to steal from thieves, as the jewellery, insured for $350,000, was going to be stolen anyway. It might as well pay for an escape from marriage and a future for the two of them, right? All the more now that Ralph has booked a trip for him and her so they can reconnect (and she can’t visit the lover that he rightly believes she has).

Now, this isn’t the most original or the most believable way to kick off a film noir, but it’s a way and I was on board for a few reasons. One is that nobody’s particularly recognisable. I’ve seen all three leads in other films and I’ve seen James Gregory, playing Nevins, elsewhere too. However, I haven’t seen them often enough to find myself distracted by their other work.

Another is that the cinematography is great, courtesy of Lionel Lindon, winner of the year’s Oscar for “Best Cinematography, Color” for his work on Around the World in Eighty Days. He had been nominated before for Going My Way and would be again for I Want to Live! He would also win a brace of Primetime Emmys, one of them for Ritual of Evil with its ambitious zoom shots.

This was shot in black and white, of course, as a film noir, and Lindon finds more key shots for Ohmart than Tryon or Lawrance, building her immediately as a femme fatale. The first is of her reapplying lipstick in a car mirror, but a lot more follow: one of her and Tryon through a jukebox particularly striking, her feeling free and him looking worried.

Ohmart gets most of the nuance too, but it’s Tryon who gets the story arc. As he eventually realises, she’s the same at the bitter end while he’s grown into someone else. He’s completely under her thumb at the beginning, but finds a good deal of courage by the end. He was surely in love. We can never truly be sure if she was, or whether she was only using him all along.

There isn’t a lot of story, but there’s a bunch more than I’ve told thus far.

Of course, Paulie’s able to talk Marsh into this strange heist, so he starts doubting all he sees, nervous of the plan unravelling.

Of course, Ralph aims to find out who Paulie is seeing on the side and the one sympathy we have for her (other than her intriguing combo of doe-eyed innocence and catlike aggression) is that he’s violent. He’s already left her with a black eye and a set of stripes on her shoulder. Now he plans a personal sting operation with his revolver within easy reach.

And, of course, there’s another player in the game, who I haven’t mentioned yet. Lawrance is Kathy Stevens, Nevins’s secretary, who has a powerful crush on Marsh, enough that Paulie’s immediately suspicious of her, even when she has no valid reason to be.

And so to the robbery, which comes halfway into the film, and leaves a corpse for the police to puzzle over. Naturally, their investigation is a wonderful way to turn the screws on all the guilty parties, not simply Paulie and Marsh but also the crooks that they held up.

I enjoyed this, but I’m a sucker for films noir and this checks all the boxes. It’s not a classic of the genre for a bunch of reasons, not least a stretch of a setup, a twist that it’s not hard to see coming and a consistent lack of chemistry between the leads.

Ohmart was wonderfully cast and makes an awful lot of what she’s given, but Tryon is a lot more static, brooding well and growing from a nervous wreck into believable confidence, but shy of the passion he needed to play a man so far under a lover’s thumb. Lawrance is capable but doesn’t get enough opportunities to shine, one scene excepted. Elaine Stritch is best of a solid supporting cast: an excellent friend and, with Billy Gray, a loving but teasing couple.

I’m watching for Tryon on his centennial, a worthy subject, albeit for both careers not just his acting, though the second, as an author, is a long way in the future at this point.

Like most actors, he started out on stage, his break in film coming here after a few roles on television. After his second billing here, he got the lead role in Screaming Eagles and co-starred in Three Violent People and The Unholy Wife, both credited right after the leads.

However, he drifted more into television, as the films available became less notable. He led the cast in I Married a Monster from Outer Space, for instance, a horror/sci-fi flick much better than its name suggests. Disney gave him a set of leads in TV movies as Texas John Slaughter.

He was considered for Sam Loomis in Psycho, Marion Crane’s lover, but lost the role to John Gavin. He was fourth billed in Something’s Got to Give, Marilyn Monroe’s final film, but it was never finished, being remade instead as Move Over, Darling with an entirely new cast.

Good roles did come, including a prominent supporting slot in The Longest Day in 1962 and the lead in The Cardinal a year later that led to a Golden Globe nomination alongside stars like Brando, Newman and Peck. Sidney Poitier won for Lilies of the Field. His final credited film role was for Color Me Dead in 1969.

However, with one career over, he found an entirely new one, as an author, writing horror novels that brought him back to film. The Other was a bestseller he adapted to film himself in 1972. Harvest Home was a TV movie with Bette Davis, The Dark Secret of Harvest Home. Finally, Fedora, from his Crowned Heads collection, was a Billy Wilder film with William Holden.

Tryon died in 1991 at sixty-five, likely from complications tied to being HIV positive.