“I
wish so much crime didn't take place after dark. It's so unnerving.”
I find stories with women seducing men to get them to do
whatever they want kind of interesting. Men falling all over themselves for a
beautiful woman boggles my mind. I am not really jealous of women who can get
men to do whatever they want for them I usually just wind up feeling bad. Most
of the famous Film Noirs have femme fatales who twist men around their fingers
and bend them to their will. The File on
Thelma Jordon is exactly that kind of story with exactly that kind of
woman.
Cleve Marshall (Wendell Corey) is the assistant District
Attorney. He is in his office late one-night drinking to work up himself up to
go home to his wife that he does not really love anymore. A woman named Thelma
Jordon (Barbara Stanwyck) comes into his office. She needs someone to help her
with her aunt. Her aunt is going crazy thinking someone is after her and trying
to rob her house. Cleve asks Thelma why she does not go to the police and she
says that her aunt does not like uniforms.
Instead of both of them going home they go out to dinner
and, big surprise, they both fall in love with each other. Cleve and Thelma
cannot be seen together so they sneak around. She gets Cleve to come to her at
a moment’s notice. He always picks her
up along the road to her house where she lives with her aunt. When Thelma is
supposed to be out the aunt wakes up when she hears someone in the house. She goes
downstairs and there is someone in the house. The aunt is shot and killed.
Thelma never got too far from the house and finds her aunt dead. She calls
Cleve before the police come to the house. He wipes down all the evidence that
Thelma was there.
The police eventually arrest Thelma on murder charges and
Cleve does whatever he can to avoid her having to go to jail. The police know
there was another person at the house but Thelma will not tell them that the
other person was Cleve. Thelma beats the murder charges but her ending comes in
the form of a former flame who will not leave her alone.
Of course Cleve cannot go unpunished and he confesses
that he was the other person at the house the night the aunt was murdered.
I wanted to like The
File on Thelma Jordon because I like Richard Siodmak and Barbara Stanwyck.
The direction was not terrible Siodmak is a fantastic director. I adore Barbara
Stanwyck but I did not like her acting, or anyone else’s acting. I also really did
not like the story too much, I do not really like it when a woman has a man
wrapped around her finger and uses him to get her out of things. But I must say
that maybe at another moment in time I will sit down and watch The File on Thelma Jordon again and
maybe I will like it a little more. For now I will say The File on Thelma Jordon is worth watching once.
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