In the mid 50s Yvonne de Carlo made two films for Republic Pictures, this and Magic Fire. Its an interesting ish tale about a PR woman who is given $100,000 by the man's very understanding widow who thinks de Carlo was his mistress.De Carlo heads down to the Bahamas with co worker (lover?) Zachary Scott and invests the money in a resort run by Kurt Kaznar, who was the poor man's Dr Smith in Land of the Giants. He's in cahoots with gangsters.
So essentially it's a film noir plot only its shot in colour and on location in the Bahamas. De Carlo's character is introduced as a sort of secretary but it's revealed she "did a bit of singing" so she performs at the night club - an awkward explanation to justify De Carlo doing a number (why not just set up her character as a singer instead of having her do that random office job?).
Also for a film noir there's a lot of talk of God - she visits a sermon by James Arness, where a lot of innocent black children sing (the only blacks we really see in this Bahamas-set film). There's also a bit of melodrama - De Carlo falls for Howard Duff, who she used to love but who doesn't remember her (nice!), and when he does remember her, his possessive mother won't let him go. So it's a film noir in color in the Bahamas with God and dance numbers and a bit of Douglas Sirk melodrama.
Then it becomes more Sirkian - it turns out de Carlo wasn't anyone's mistress, the mistress was Duff's mother, De Carlo was pregnant to Duff years ago and had a stillborn baby, de Carlo just took the money because someone offered and hey why not, and Duff's mother dies after talking to de Carlo and... anyway it just gets all silly and weird.
Like a lot of mid 50s de Carlo films, too much is going on. Why have Zachary Scott in this film? Why introduce an exciting element like gangsters co owning a casino and ignoring them until the end? Why spent all this time on Duff and De Carlo and have De Carlo just dump Duff over the phone? When did De Carlo and Arness fall in love? When he grabbed her?
There's a lot of pawing of De Carlo in this film - Scott does it and Kaznar and Arness. She sings two numbers both of which kind of stick out.
It's a bit of a mess but not unwatchable.
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