User Reviews

Sultry Las Vegas hostess Eva Ashley (Linda Christian) and her ruthless lover (Henry Silva) make a living shaking down smitten saps but when she kills one, Eva gets black-listed in the gambling mecca and her casino-employed boyfriend is exiled to Mexico. With nowhere to go, Eva marries Oscar Blinney (Larry Sorch), a meek L.A. bank clerk who'd fallen hard for her while on vacation; when she finds out the chump handles payrolls, Eva lures her old flame back to the States and together they blackmail Oscar into robbing his bank -but a tricky triple cross provides an out in more ways than one...

International playgirl Linda Christian, ex-wife of actors Tyrone Power and Edmund Purdom, exudes experienced sex appeal as the avaricious Eva and an intense Henry Silva does his best Jack Palance impersonation but Larry Storch still manages to make an impression as the mouse that roared when pushed too far in this twisty screenplay by pulp icon David Goodis, based on a novel by the underrated Henry Kane. Co-starring Myron Healy, John "Deathdream" Marley, and Alan "Batman" Napier.

***SPOILERS*** Hostess at the Mojave Casino Eva Ashley, Linda Christian, has been cheating on her boyfriend floor manager Peter Rogan, Myron Healey, for some time now. It's when Peter found out about Eva two timing him that he blew fuse and confronted her in her motel room leading to him getting killed, by Eva bashing his head in, by her. With Peter dead the big boss of the Mojave Casino Mike Chambers, John Marley,has Eva canned together with her boyfriend whom she was cheating on Peter with Bill Grant, Henry Silva, sent to far off Mexico City in one of Chambers lesser casinos to chill out.

It's then that nerdy and a bit unsure of himself, with women, Mojave Casino hotel guest Oscar Blinney played by Larry "F-Troop" Storch came on the scene. Oscar is just crazy about Eva and wants to strike up some kind of relationship with her. At first having nothing to do with Oscar it's when she's down in the dumps that Eva decides to latch on to him just so he can pay her rent as well as food and cosmetic bills. Finding out that Oscar is a bank teller in L.A Grant together with Eva, who by then had married Oscar, plan to use Oscar to embezzle $50,000.00 on the promise that it would pay for her to divorce him. Something that Oscar in finding out what a horror she is desperately wants.

***SPOILERS*** The plan concocted by both Grant and Eva is to get Oscar to steal the 50 G's where the two would check out of the country to Puerto Rico with it and thus having Oscar ending up a free man in having nothing more to do with Eva by getting her out of his life. it's when Grant tells Oscar that he plans to double-cross Eva by murdering her and taking off with all the cash that Oscar, who wasn't crazy about all this in the first place, starts to get second thought on participating in this "perfect crime".

Really satisfying ending with Oscar against all the odds as well as the Hollywood Hayes Commission pulling off the perfect crime but not exactly the way Grant as well as Eva earlier wanted him too. The crime was so perfect that even the police who smelled a rat in Oscar's heroics, in preventing a bank robbery, at the bank that he worked in still couldn't bring themselves to arrest the guy. In them knowing that Oscar did the right thing in preventing the bank robbery even though he in some way was involved in it! And the kicker to all this is that if in case they did arrest him there's no jury on earth that would have convicted Oscar for what he did!

An exceptional story with lots of double crosses, good performances, and a neat twist at the end.

She may be self indulgent and deceitful but Linda Christian as the finally undone femme fatale looks delicious. She's so sexy that it's no surprise that a schlub like Larry Storch should fall for her and marry her, even though she turns his home into a dump and is mostly drunk. But she's so slippery and full of intrigue that it's no surprise that the equally guileful but thoroughly broke Henry Silva, who has been boffing her on the side, should enter into a pact that solves both Silva's and Storch's problems. Storch will slip him the payroll information and Silva will kill Christian and then stage a fake hold up of the bank at which Storch works.

Nice, tight, economical writing. When Storch first meets Christian at a resort, she's just been fired and is on the alert for any source of pelf. Storch invites her for coffee. The dialog goes something like this.

Christian: "What business are you in?" Storch: "Banking." Christian (her face brightening): "Banking?" Storch: "Oh, I'm not president or anything. I'm just a teller." Christian (glancing at her watch): "Gosh, look at the time. I'm already late." Storch is okay as the drone but he was particularly good at comic roles, especially those involving accents of any earthly nation. He could draw a convincing differentiation between Chinese and Japanese accents. Listen to his Russian accent in "Who Was That Lady?"

But Henry Silva dominates every scene they're in together because Storch is barely of medium height whereas Silva is tall. But then, by that standard, Alan Napier as the bank manager overshadows everyone. I know it's hard to believe but Napier, Alfred in the Batman series, was eleven feet, five and a half inches tall. Maybe taller. He could see your house from wherever he was standing. He was once seen to bump his head on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, causing a shower of plaster and paint. An international incident was narrowly prevented by the intervention of the Pope himself, who absolved Napier of his sin but, as penance, made him repaint the ceiling in its original detail. At first Napier insisted on plain eggshell white but His Holiness was adamant, even after Napier argued that Michelangelo was "a queer" and "not so hot to begin with". Legend has it that the spiteful Napier added a Salvador Dali mustache to one of the figures.

I don't think you could have crammed any more despicable characters into this story if you tried. Almost everyone in it is on the take or trying to. Even Oscar Blenny (Larry Storch), with a bit of larceny in his heart as he hears out Bill Grant's (Henry Silva) plan for making him a single man once again. Having married the down on her luck vixen Eva Ashley (Linda Christian), Oscar has major second thoughts every day as he comes home to a mess of an apartment and the drunken Eva, who only married him because she needed a roof over her head and some cash for her foibles. That little segue with Oscar on the shooting range with his boss Hodges (Alan Napier) turned out to be of some benefit when push came to shove, with Blenny seemingly backed into a corner with Bill Grant's scheme to take care of two problems in one fell swoop. What I couldn't get over was watching Oscar scoop all those bundles of cash into Grant's suitcase right out there in the open at Oscar's window at the bank! How is it no other customers could see what was going on? In any event, other reviewers for this episode run it down with more detail, but for my money, you have to check out the comments by poster 'rmax304823'. In fact, you can forget about my review and just go read his for a stunning recap featuring mid-Sixties TV series Batman butler, Alan Napier.