The Golden Age Of The B-Film Noir- Paulette Goddard’s “The Unholy Four” (1954)

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

The Unholy Four, starring Paulette Goddard, Hammer Productions, 1954 (released in England as A Stranger Came Home)

In my long career in the film reviewing racket, a cutthroat where you are only as good as your last review and the vulture competing reviewers are ready with the long knives if you fall down profession. If you will though which is overall pretty subjective one, filled with personal predilections and snarls when you think about it, I have run up against all kind of readerships and readers but my recent escapade with one reader takes the cake as they used to say in the old days. As the headline above indicates I have been doing a serious of reviews of B-grade film noirs by the English Hammer Production Company from the early 1950s. A B-grade film noir is one that is rather thin on plotline and maybe film quality usually made on the cheap although some of the classics with B-film noir queen Gloria Grahame have withstood the test of time despite that quality. I have  contrasted those with the classics like The Maltese Falcon, Out Of The Past, The Big Sleep, and The Last Man Standing to give the knowledgeable reader an idea of the different. In the current series the well-known Hollywood producer Robert Lippert contracted with Hammer for a series of ten films which would star let’s say a well-known if faded Hollywood star like Dane Clark or Richard Conte as a draw and a cheap purchase English supporting cast with a thin storyline.    

I had done a bunch of these reviews (minus a couple which I refused to review since they were so thin I couldn’t justify the time and effort to even give the “skinny” on them) using a kind of standard format discussing the difference between the classics and Bs in some detail and then as has been my wont throughout my career giving a short summary of the film’s storyline and maybe a couple of off-hand comments so that the readership has something to hang its hat on when choosing to see, or not see, the film. All well and good until about my fifth review when a reader wrote in complaining about my use of that standard form to introduce each film. Moreover, and this is the heart of the issue, she mentioned that perhaps I was getting paid per word, a “penny a word” in her own words and so was padding my reviews with plenty that didn’t directly relate to the specific film I was reviewing. Of course other than to cut me to the quick “penny a word” went out with the dime store novel and I had a chuckle over that expression since I have had various contracts for work over the years but not that one.

The long and short of it was that the next review was a stripped- down version of the previous reviews which I assumed would satisfy her complaint. Not so. Using the name Nora Charles, the well-known distaff side of the Dashiell Hammett-inspired film series The Thin Man from the 1930s and early 1940s starring William Powell and Myrna Loy, she still taunted me with that odious expression of hers. (By the way one of the pitfalls of citizen journalism, citizen commentary on-line is that one can use whatever moniker one wants to say the most unsavory things and not flame any blow-back).

Here is the “skinny” in any case and let dear sweet Nora suffer through another review-if she dares. Four guys go fishing, fair enough, but only three came back. The missing one, Phillip, the husband of lure the audience in Paulette Goddard (on the downslope of her career with this nondescript effort), playing Angie the non-grieving wife. No foul play suspected, none that is until about four years later and probably a dozen unacknowledged Angie affairs later Phillip inconveniently shows up, claimed amnesia and maybe he did have it stranger things have occurred. Although being bopped on the head, drugged and left to die are rough things to have happen among friends. Those inconveniences Phillip showed up for were the murder of one of the boys and somebody who was unhappy since they were making a play, a gold-digger play for Angie. Angie playing on her best behavior helps Phillip out while keeping her options open in case her hubby takes the fall, takes the big step-off. Maybe Phillip should have picked better fishing partners or taken up golf because before he is done one of those good old boys, one of John Bull’s finest will actually be taking that big ste-off. Oh, well, enough Nora, right.