Hollywood's Dangerous Dames, Barbara Payton: "Bad Blonde" (Full Movie)

The Film Forum series includes “Angel Face” (1952), in which Otto Preminger, a rationalistic master of hidden madness, stages a conflict between two feminine tropes, the evil stepmother and the predatory vixen, and a male one, the freelancer with a roving eye. A writer (Herbert Marshall) who was widowed during the London Blitz lives in California with his second wife (Barbara O’Neil), a wealthy woman who clashes with him and his viperish daughter, Diane (Jean Simmons). The sexually swaggering Frank (Robert Mitchum), an ambulance driver whose irrepressible lust is his point of vulnerability, is called to the house, where he falls under Diane’s spell and gets pulled into her plot to kill her stepmother. Preminger, who studied law, builds tragic results from the evenhanded workings of the judicial system. Source: www.newyorker.com

New York City's Film Forum is taking a comprehensive look at lovely but lethal beauties throughout film history with its series Femmes Noirs: Hollywood's Dangerous Dames. Although the programming includes films from the silent period (Pandora's Box) to the age of modern neo-noir (Body Heat), classic-era films noir dominate. The iconic roles of this series comprise wicked women portrayed by legendary actresses: Barbara Stanwyck's borderline psychotic Phyllis in Double Indemnity; Joan Bennett's singularly manipulative and slatternly Kitty in Scarlet Street; and Mary Astor as congenital liar Brigid O'Shaughnessy in John Huston's adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon. There are also surprising against-type performances by movie stars: Gene Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven, Jean Simmons in Angel Face, Marilyn Monroe in Niagara.

Joan Crawford plays the victim of devious women twice, in Mildred Pierce and Sudden Fear. The B-girls also get their due, with screenings of Gun Crazy and Detour, featuring two of the greatest female performances in noir, Peggy Cummins and Ann Savage respectively. See the Film Forum's website for details on the series, running Friday, July 18 through Thursday, August 7. Source: www.filmnoirfoundation.org

As Wade Williams explains in a Filmfax magazine article from July 1988, “Media critics have labeled 'Detour' as everything from cynical, to surreal, to perverse, to absurdist, to paranoid and nihilistic.”
Based on a 1938 Martin Goldsmith novel, 'Detour' is recognized as a salient prototype in the film noir genre, beginning with Neal’s lead character — a downand- out antihero of the first order. As a hard-luck musician named Al Roberts, who, while traveling cross-country, becomes involved in an accidental murder, the actor expertly conveys the ordeal of an ill-fated loser who blindly follows a pre-destined path to an ominous outcome. In addition to the trouble-plagued Roberts character, the film features the most strident and venomous femme fatale in screen history, Vera (played in mordant style by B-movie actress Ann Savage). Detour arguably contains the definitive Tom Neal performance, and remains his best remembered film.

In her first starring role ("Trapped"), Barbara Payton looks gorgeous and performs well as a young woman whose ardent loyalty to her lover is matched only by her unmitigated greed. “Money… there’s just never enough of it,” she purrs in one scene, as she slowly massages Bridges’ shoulders. Not the typical film noir femme fatale, her character seems much more devoted than duplicitous. She is willing to go along with her boyfriend’s unlawful schemes so they can be together, with barely a thought to the possible consequences.

Acclaimed NYC stage director and writer David Drake, the star of one of off-Broadway’s longest-running one-person shows, The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me, recently saw Trapped for the first time and agrees with the positive reviews that Barbara received at the time of its release: “Without question, Barbara displays a lot of raw, able talent in the film. I found it very telling that her best scene work was with Lloyd Bridges (with whom, I understand, she was rumored to have had an affair). She really knows how to play the act of seduction, not the phony ‘Hollywood’ indicating that so often passed as seduction in Barbara’s era, but the real stuff. It is in the way she caresses Bridges’ hair and shoulders. Very real. Very true. She clearly understood the who, what, where, when and why’s of grasping and accepting and playing a character’s intentions and actions in a script. This was a smart girl with solid acting instincts."

In the years prior to his meeting Barbara, Tom Neal's name was linked to a bevy of Hollywood stars, starlets (and strippers), including Ava Gardner, Joan Crawford, Lana Turner, Lorraine Cugat (the wife of bandleader Xavier Cugat) and Dixie Dunbar. In the early 1940s he even flirted with American aristocracy for a time when he was engaged to Gay Parkes, a member of the wealthy DuPont family of industrialists.


In a brilliant stroke of reality-based typecasting, the plot of "Bad Blonde" (aka The Flanagan Boy) in 1953 found the real life femme fatale playing her cinematic counterpart — surely the film’s main point of interest today. When, in a guttural tone of voice, she berates her weakwilled boyfriend for initially backing down on their murder plans, Barbara seems to be drawing on a familiar emotional scenario. “Get lost,” she sneers, in a voice dripping with venom.

Barbara’s wonderfully subtle performance in 'Murder Is My Beat,' though unheralded at the time of the film’s release fifty years ago, is well-regarded today by a myriad of film critics. Even though her second-billed part is relatively small, Barbara’s character is the axis on which the plot’s crucial elements revolve and her underplaying of the role, whether intentional or not, proved effective in creating an interesting character whose guilt is questioned throughout much of the film. Authors Alain Silver and Robert Porfirio, two highly respected experts of film noir, applaud the careful nuance and skill in Barbara’s performance and write in Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to The American Style, that “…Payton’s portrayal of Eden in a neutral manner permits the suggestion of instability beneath the surface calm of her character’s visage.” -"Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye - The Barbara Payton Story" (2013) by John O'Dowd

PLAN9CRUNCH: What contemporary star is most like Payton as an actress?

O'DOWD: I’m not sure I can answer that question as I am nearly completely unfamiliar with the work (and even the names) of most contemporary film actresses (especially those in their 20s and 30s). There is a film project on Barbara’s life (titled “Bad Blonde”) that is currently in development in Los Angeles, and I am trusting that the two producers who are shepherding the project (Ira Besserman and Barrett Stuart) know a lot more about today’s actresses than I do, because unfortunately, I know very little. I am not a big fan of the majority of today’s films, as they seem to concentrate more on special effects than on character-driven storylines (which is what I prefer). I am far more interested in, and have more knowledge of, the films and stars of Classic Hollywood. Source: planninecrunch.blogspot.com