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!”
