You are having a little bad luck. An attractive woman gives you a deal you can’t refuse. And then you think, maybe, just maybe, that you are being set up and about to be murdered. That’s when a little bad luck turns into very bad luck.
That’s what Ed Shaw (Keith Andes — Project X, Split Second) is faced with in director Paul Guilfoyle’s 1955 film noir tale, A Life at Stake, which will be heading home on Sept. 7 as both DVD and Blu-ray product offerings from the Film Detective.
This is a new 4K transfer from archival film elements.
As the story unfolds, we learn that poor Ed, an architect by trade, has been wiped out in a business deal gone south. That’s the bad luck, but just when everything looks pretty bleak, up pops socialite Doris Hillman, played by Angela Lansbury, who had gone from being nominated for Best Supporting Actress Oscars in Gaslight and The Picture of Dorian Gray to appearing in random episodic television productions during the early 1950s. This was her return to the screen (The Purple Mask, A Lawless Street, The Court Jester and Please Murder Me would quickly follow).
She had just hit 30-years-of-age and was cast in a film noir as the femme fatale. It seemed a little off-mark, but that’s OK, she carries it off. In any case, she approaches the down-on-his-luck architect with a proposal that is just too good to be true.
It seems that Doris has a sugar-daddy for a husband by the name of Gus (Douglass Dumbrille) and she would like to enter into a business arrangement with Ed … she’ll find the real estate, he will design and build the homes.
And there is a bonus, Doris comes on to Ed like he’s the last man on earth!!
Wow, money to burn and romance. Oh, wait, wait, here comes the hook, the catch, that extra little detail. Oh Ed, sweetie, my husband insists that you have a large life insurance policy just in case of an accident, or something.
Soon Ed, who has been a little dense to this point, begins to put two and two together and becomes convinced that Doris and her older husband, Gus, are scam artists and he’s their next victim … oh for the days of just bad luck!!
Bonus features include commentary by film noir scholar and critic Jason Ney and the featurette titled “Hollywood Hitch-Hikers: Inside the Filmmaker.”
No comments:
Post a Comment