This marked the beginning of what turned out to be a short-lived tilt at American stardom by Diana Dors. It was one of two films she made for RKO, then in their last significant burst of filmmaking activity. She had received praise for playing a killer in Yield to the Night, which might have inspired her casting as a femme fetale here.
For the most part, I enjoyed this film more than I thought I would considering its bad reputation – Dors wasn’t the best actor in the world but she was sexy, and wears a series of low cut gowns, tight clothes and swimsuits; she’s effective in prison garb too. Her character is quite sympathetic – she’s a single mother, she tries to warn Rod Steiger off her, you can understand why she’d want to cheat on Steiger with Tom Tryon, she realises at the end she's behaved badly.
The story is junky melodrama, which borrows liberally from They Knew What They Wanted (vineyard owners in movies are forever marrying younger women who have affairs) – also it seems inspired from all those episodes of the radio show Suspense where a killer got away with murder they committed only to be convicted for a murder they didn’t commit.
Jonathan Latimer wrote the script (he'd done a number of other films with director John Farrow), and he keeps things bubbling along, jazzing up the structure by using a flashback within a flashback, throwing in a hunky rodeo rider, a war wound causing infertility, a poisoned mother.
The wheels fall off in the last ten minutes or so though when the film becomes all about Dors repenting for what she's done to a priest (Steiger's brother) - this has the whiff of John Farrow's Catholicism all over it (as does all the Bible quoting), and it really slows down the action. It's also a shame this wasn't shot in black and white - the colour photography is wasted. This was Farrow's penultimate movie as director.
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