Some movies are rarely screened because they’re so shit that’s all they deserve. This year’s film noir festival at the Egyptian Theater, in their effort to for the most part avoid the obvious selections, it’s the seventh annual festival after all, seems to be scraping the bottom of the barrel more than ever. Lasts night’s (mostly) worthless features included 1951’s
The Whip Hand and 1954’s
Wicked as the Come. Both were seemingly classified as “noirs” simply because they were filmed in black and white, and one suspects it’s harder to get people to come to the theater to see D-movies instead of “film-noirs.”
Wicked as the Come tells the story of a poor girl from Brooklyn sleeping her way out of the slums and straight to the top. She can’t love because of being “attacked” by four guys in her youth, but she can look beautiful, and use a succession of men to get what she wants - which is apparently being married to a really rich dude & living in France. Unfortunately one of the men she has fucked over eventually comes calling, looking for revenge. She steals her rich husbands gun intending to defend herself, but ends up killing her husband (who she mistakes for her prowling ex-lover in a fit of hysteria). Convicted of murdering her husband to get his money, she’s sentenced to die at the guillotine, but is saved when the man who “really” loves her, tracks down the prowling ex-lover who confesses he actually existed, which leads to her conviction being commuted to manslaughter (and a three months sentence instead of off with her head).
The horrible titled
The Whip Hand (there is no whip or hand involved in the film as far as I could tell - over even really “a position of dominance” as the phrase is described as meaning in the dictionaries) was so ridiculously awful that it made
Wicked as the Come appear as a quality entertainment. It did feature some moments of competent cinematography, but with rotten acting (but it’s amazing the actors could even keep straight faces dealing with such garbage) and an even worse, honestly embarrassingly bad plot - this is one film I’d cry no tears over if it were to be lost for good. The laughable story, seeped in the anti-communist fervor that was gaining momentum in the USA of the time, features a cell of American communists settled in a small town, developing (along with the help of an ex-Nazi scientist) germ cultures that they intend to use (under orders from Moscow, seen pointing at a US map in the first scene & speaking gibberish Russian) to wipe out America. Luckily our hero, a magazine writer on vacation, stumbles into town after bumping his head while trying to fish in the local watering hole. His suspicions are slowly aroused by the strange way everyone is acting and their efforts to get him to split. Also that all the fish have died after being mysteriously poisoned. In twenty-four hours he also manages to “fall in love” with the local beauty, who happens to be the sister of one of the doctors developing the germ warfare project. When the bad guys get sick of the reporter poking around, they decide to bump him off, he attempts to escape with the girl (in one hilarious scene they sneak through the town at night carrying a canoe, hiding behind a building with the tip of the canoe pointing around the corner (unnoticed!). Of course they are eventually captured, and the villains explain all their plans as they are about to inject the lovers with hideous diseases. Fortunately, at the last moment, ten or twelve machine-gun wielding FBI men called in by the reporter’s colleagues storm the communist’s compound and just manage to save the day. A close escape!
It’s interesting to think of the hundreds, or more likely thousands of movies that were made like this. Low budget, no real thought to quality or merit, other than their ability to fill up time on a movie screen and make a few dollars from gullible or exhausted suckers who might have nothing better to do than watch whatever was put in front of them. Or worse, you think of the effect these films could have possibly had on the not fully formed minds of younger viewers of the times. Harmless entertainment, or pro-war and anti-women brainwashing?
