Ginger Rogers returns to the type of ‘Anytime Annie’ role that first got her noticed in the early thirties. Vince Striker, the cop played by Brian Keith, describes her as ‘smart talking, brassy, third class citizen’. But Ginger’s now on her third decade of stardom, so even though we first see her doing laundry in jail, she’s got the type of manicured nails that would make Barbra Streisand proud decades later; and this being Ginger in the 50s, her character’s a product of her environment, which here means a good girl who’s been accompanied by the wrong men but never so far as to do anything ‘cheap’; she’s been jailed for being a chump rather than for being guilty of anything.

Fingernails

She plays Sherry Conley, the only person left who can finger mob boss Benjamin Costain (Lorne Green) and get him kicked out of the country as an ‘undesirable alien’. Edward G. Robinson is the D.A who hopes to convince her. Brian Keith is the love interest as the cop who’s charged with protecting her. It’s a film worth seeing for its brilliant cast. Robinson and Keith are old dependables but it’s lovely to see Ginger play so broad and brass and Lorne Greene surprises (and makes one think of what all those years playing Pa in Bonanza might have deprived us of).

noir

The film itself hovers between comedy (mainly at the beginning) and noir (near the end). It takes very cheap shots at television with the camera repeatedly cutting to what’s on television (hair lotion commercials, hillbilly music, fund-raising marathons) followed by the characters derision of the content (‘television should be so good that when you close your eyes it sounds like the radio’). The recent House of Unamerican Activities Hearings are also everywhere evident in the narrative: the film begins with Ginger in jail telling a new inmate, ‘never volunteer for ‘nuting’ and ends with her convinced that it’s everyone’s responsibility – a well-worn word throughout the narrative – to point the finger and inform.

Television:

Ostensibly inspired by the strong-arm tactics used to get Virginia Hill to testify against Bugsy Siegel. Based on Leonard Kantor’s 1953 Broadway play, DEAD PIGEON, which took place entirely in a hotel room, and which the film opens up with a chase scene at the beginning, a court-room scene at the end, and by designing the hotel so that it’s at angles where one sees the various rooms, the windows looking outside, and the doorways at angles so one can see the hotel corridor. An ingenious use of mirrors enhances the view into the different spaces.

Spaces

An uneven film that progressively turns up the tension, becomes increasingly more interesting, visually and narratively, as it goes long, with a wise-cracking and rousing finale in the courtroom scene at he finale. I ended up liking it.