Friday 24 July 2020

Reflections on ... Lizabeth Scott in Dark City (1950)




Recently watched: Dark City (1950). I will always drop everything to watch a movie starring smoky-eyed, husky-voiced Lizabeth Scott (1922–2015) – one of the most haunting and memorable actresses of the forties and fifties and a perennial favourite of mine.  


But in Dark City (a minor but taut and suspenseful film noir crime drama), Scott’s role as Fran Garland, the long-suffering and neglected love interest of Charlton Heston, is unrewarding. On the plus side, since she’s playing a nightclub chanteuse, Scott gets to wear a series of sensational painted-on sequinned gowns (by Edith Head) and throatily warble some torch songs (although it’s not her own voice - she’s dubbed by a professional singer. Scott frequently played nightclub singers and one of the great mysteries of her career is that Paramount executives never permitted her to do her own singing onscreen – even though she was a stylish and alluring singer in her own right and released an album in 1957). 


But mostly Scott is required to be masochistically devoted to Heston and give him pleading, dewy-eyed looks. After juicy and challenging parts in superior films like Pitfall (1948) and Too Late for Tears (1949), Dark City must have felt anti-climactic for Scott. Eventually you want to grab Fran by the shoulders, shake her hard and say, “He’s just not that into you!”



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