I am a huge, slobbering fan of actress Lizabeth Scott.
She had a relatively brief and some might even argue minor film career in the 1940s and '50s, but to me she'll always remain one of my favorite movie stars and is, I think,
the quintessential classic Noir dame.
A strikingly beautiful blonde with a husky voice, she was a model and stage understudy when she was discovered by producer Hal Wallis after he left Warner Brothers to become an independent producer, with his pictures distributed mostly through Paramount. After co-starring in a small drama with Robert Cummings,
You Came Along (1945) directed by John Farrow and co-scripted by Ayn Rand of all people, she made her mark in her second film, a supporting role in
The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946 - Lewis Milestone), a Noirish melodrama starring Barbara Stanwyck and Van Heflin (also notable as Kirk Douglas' debut). That led to her real big break. After Rita Hayworth had to back out of
Dead Reckoning (1947) because her then-husband Orson Welles wanted her for
The Lady from Shanghai, Lizabeth was given the lead opposite Humphrey Bogart. It's a post-War Noirish mystery, and a good one. Lizabeth is sexy and commanding on the screen, and her character is the sympathetic love interest. She more than holds her own with Bogie on screen. Her next was an oddly Technicolor Noir,
Desert Fury (1947) with Burt Lancaster and Mary Astor. But again Lizabeth is basically a good girl mixed up in a bad circumstance. In
I Walk Alone (1948) she's paired with Burt Lancaster again as well as Kirk Douglas (the first time Kirk and Burt worked together). Now she's stepping a bit closer to the classic Femme Fatale archetype, though not there yet. That year she was also in the underrated
Pitfall (1948 - André De Toth) where she plays a sort of unwitting Femme Fatale as the unforgettable object of desire to both married man Dick Powell as well as a sleazy P.I. played by Raymond Burr, who basically blackmails her into a sexual affair. But even then, Lizabeth's character wasn't intentionally luring these men, they were just drawn to her. It's her next movie,
Too Late for Tears (1949 - Byron Haskin), where she assumes the mantle of Queen of Noir. Here she plays a woman capable of anything to get what she wants, which happens to be a case full of sixty-grand in cash. Her natural beauty is turned for selfish evil, and it's delicious to watch.
Lizabeth would appear in movies other than those classified as Noir throughout the 1950s, including the Victor Mature melodrama
Easy Living, the Martin & Lewis flick
Scared Stiff, the Westerns
Silver Lode and
Red Mountain, and Elvis Presley's second movie
Loving You. But while she was good in all of these, it was the dark crime pictures where she was absolutely perfect:
Dark City (1950),
The Racket (1951),
The Company She Keeps (1951),
Two of a Kind (1951) and
Stolen Face (1952). She didn't appear in the best-known Noirs, but they are some of the best in terms of quality and her performances are iconic and sexy. With her husky voice and blonde hair she has sometimes been labeled a poor man's Lauren Bacall (co-starring with Bogart in
Dead Reckoning helped with that perception), but while movies such as
Double Indemnity, Out of the Past and
The Postman Always Rings Twice are rightfully heralded as classics, nobody, not Stanwyck, not Lana Turner, not Veronica Lake or Rita Hayworth or Ava Gardner or anybody was ever any better than Lizabeth Scott in the genre.
Through all of her success, Lizabeth never became an A-list star. After gossip in the Hollywood tabloids implied she was a lesbian, in 1955 she sued
Confidential Magazine for $2.5-million in libel damages. The suit was eventually thrown out on a technicality and Scott dropped the matter. But she chose to essentially retire after that incident, appearing on episodic television now and then and made one final screen appearance in Mike Hodges & Michael Caine's odd
Get Carter follow-up,
Pulp (1972) at the age of fifty, but nothing since then. Lizabeth never married and has never said whether or not the '50s rumors about her sexuality were true, and it doesn't matter in the slightest. She's still with us, turned eighty-five this year, but generally hasn't done much in the way of public appearances the past forty years. Anytime I want to curl up with her, I just pop
Dead Reckoning or
Too Late for Tears into the DVD player.
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