I grew up with Angela Lansbury. Not literally, of course, but as a child of the 1980s, she was a perpetual staple on television. She starred in Murder, She Wrote for 12 seasons, and while that wasn’t a show I ever watched (it was for old people), it was still a decade of my life of seeing previews for it, commercials for it, and Ms. Lansbury showing up on talk shows to talk about it. She was always popping up on talk shows and awards ceremonies. She was a huge celebrity in my youth, even though I had hardly ever seen her in anything. And then of course, she voiced Mrs. Potts in Beauty and the Beast and sang the title song, which makes me cry every time I hear it.
Buy A Life at Stake Blu-rayI knew her as a sweet old lady. A dotty, elderly woman who wrote books and solved murders in her spare time. And as a kindly teapot singing about love. It wasn’t until years later that I saw her in something else. She was excellent as the cold, calculating Mrs. Iselin in The Manchurian Candidate. I was shocked to see her as a Cockney tart in Gaslight, her first film role. She was so young. And beautiful. And dare I say, sexy?
I would have been completely flabbergasted had I seen her in A Life at Stake back then. She plays Dorris Hillman, a femme fatale in this low-budget film noir, newly released on Blu-ray by Film Masters. She’s introduced as a woman who likes to swim naked. Our hero Edward Shaw (Keith Andes), who is introduced wearing only pajama shorts and no shirt, is told this when he appears at her house by the maid. He barges right into the pool area and finds her not naked, of course (for this is still a 1950s movie), but in a slinky bathing suit. When she gets out of the pool, she’ll complain that her top is uncomfortable when it’s wet and pulls it down, covering herself with a towel first (again, this is the 1950s). I don’t mean to keep talking about her state of dress (or undress) except to indicate this is a character who is immediately using her sexuality to get what she wants. And as that woman is played by Angela Lansbury, it does come as something of a shock.
He’s a down-on-his-luck architect and house builder. She’s rich and bored. Her husband is willing to finance her in a business venture just to give her something to do. She wants to develop some land and figures he could build the houses. She used to be a real-estate broker, so she can sell the homes as soon as he builds them. All of that sounds good until she starts asking him if he’s got life insurance. When he says he has a small policy, she asks him to bump it up to half a million dollars.
Now you and I and everybody else watching this film know where it goes next. We’ve seen Double Indemnity and countless other film noirs. But Edward Shaw must have also caught one or two of those films because he immediately thinks something is up. She eventually convinces him to insure himself for $175,000 by using her feminine wiles. They negotiate between sultry kisses, which either makes this the most erotic business negotiation ever put on screen or the strangest.
Things go okay for a little while. The money (and more kisses) start rolling in, but then he meets Doris’s sister Madge (Claudia Barrett) who lets loose that Doris was married once before, and that guy died under mysterious circumstances and left her a fortune in insurance money. The film starts to slip out of film-noir territory and into paranoid-thriller territory. Things are complicated further when a secondary romance springs up between Madge and Edward. This leaves poor Doris out of the picture for large chunks of the second act, and with a runtime of just 76 minutes, there really isn’t enough time to develop either relationship, leaving them both feeling a little flat.
There are some interesting things going on in the plot, more than enough to keep me interested. But its B-movie origins keep showing its seams. Cinematographer Ted Allan tries to give it some classic noir lighting, but either the budget or his incompetence means you mostly get a lot of poorly lit exteriors where you can barely see what’s going on. Angela Lansbury was a great actress, but she struggles here. She just doesn’t have the raw sexuality or the icy cold calculations that the character needs.
What’s left is a pretty good little film noir. Nothing you’ll remember long after you’ve seen it, but fans of the genre, and those interested in Lansbury’s long, storied career, will find enough to love to make it worth the watching.
The Blu-ray transfer looks quite good. There are a few scratches and debris visible. I noticed several instances where a second or two seems to be missing from some scenes, and at least once where the film slowed down for a moment (presumably to let the audio catch up with the missing film element). I assume all of that comes from what’s left of the original print. But I could find no information confirming that. There are no extras.
