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Powerful

Lack of good storyline.

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

Dr. Richard Talbot (Kent Smith) is a middle aged man living in San Francisco with two good kids, a dutiful wife, and a good medical practice, respected in the community. And he has one of the dullest most routine lives in the history of the world and doesn't even realize it until one night on his way home from his office he sees a girl (Ann Sheridan as Nora Prentiss) hit by a car and stops to render aid. She has only minor injuries, and he treats her in his office while she flirts shamelessly. He tries to remain aloof, but does kiss her goodnight at her invitation. Something awakens in Richard.And then the two begin seeing each other. Innocently at first - he shows up at her nightclub to watch her sing on the excuse of eating dinner. And it builds from there. Suddenly the doctor realizes just how dull and routine his life is. He doesn't want to slip into the trap of an extramarital affair, and he tries to get his wife to agree to do "fun" things with him, but she just poo poos him and says they are too old for that sort of thing.Well, the initial bloom of the affair turns to unhappiness for both Nora and Richard as Nora wants more - and so does Richard for that matter - but he just can't commit the overt act of breaking up his family. He can't make real and open what has been the truth for months. So Nora decides to make a clean break. She is moving to New York to sing in a club for an old friend (Robert Alda as Phil Denardo).Richard won't lose Nora, but he can't bring himself to ask for a divorce either. As the clock is ticking on Nora's train out of town, in walks a patient with a fatal heart condition complaining of horrible chest pains. Richard tries to save him, but the patient dies in his office. Richard and the patient were alone. The patient has already said he lives at the YMCA and has no friends or family. And the dead man is the same weight, age, and height as the doctor.So a cowardly solution comes to Richard's mind. He puts the dead man's body in his own car, dowses it with gasoline, sets it ablaze, and pushes it from the road off a cliff to the rocks below. The body is burned beyond recognition with all of Richard's identifying belongings on him. And then he catches up with Nora and lies to her about how he has asked for a divorce and is leaving town with her.He reads the San Francisco papers in New York and reads of his funeral. But he also reads of an investigation caused by his partner in the practice noticing some funny things that might mean Richard was being blackmailed and was perhaps murdered. So Richard's plans - of which Nora knows nothing - are possibly foiled. I'll let you see how this all works out, but I'll just say the irony is astounding, and ask you - at the end of the film, what would you do if you were Nora?Kent Smith never really caught on in motion pictures, but here he is great as a man who starts out as dead on the inside but respected, then alive but torn, and then trapped in a jail of his own making as his sanity slowly unwinds. Nora is a tragic figure, even though she started the flirtation, probably just making fun of a guy she at first found unbelievably stiff given the world of nightclubs in which she lived. Robert Alda is as patient as a saint as the guy who loves Nora, knows all about the home she broke up but not about how Richard actually broke it, and doesn't judge her.If you want to watch a noir in which everybody's life becomes a train wreck but you really can't find one evil character, just one cowardly one, this is your film. It's also one of the first post war films to incorporate the theme of being all alone in a big city despite the sea of people.

This B movie melodrama of love and the tragedy of mistaken identity is a quagmire of improbable twists and turns. Kent Smith, an actor with no screen charisma, plays a doctor and solid family man who falls for nightclub singer Ann Sheridan. There is no heat in their coupling; he courts his new love like a dispassionate doctor making a routine house call on a patient. After some initial snappish, flirtatious interchange with the doctor, Sheridan presents her character as refined and lady-like, not a nightclub flame that sets men afire with self-destructive desire. And self-destruction is what lies in wait for the doctor. Not an example of the noir genre, this is a tepid movie, grim and dour.

Scarlet Street is one of my favorite films noir. But seeing Nora Prentiss again recently for the first time in about 25 years, I am struck by a couple of aspects of Nora that make it superior to Scarlet, for this viewer.For one thing, Dr. Talbot's wife and family are pleasant enough. Maybe a little square. --But the home Talbot forsakes has nothing at all in common with the loveless, bitter home life in which Chris Cross is trapped in Scarlet Street. So by the end of Nora Prentiss, you feel, doubly, the sting of the mistake this films anti-hero has made in leaving the life he had, in doomed pursuit of the other woman. In Scarlet Street, the choice between life as a homeless, haunted drifter, and a life suffered in total subjugation to a shrew and harpy, could be seen as a toss-up.And for another thing, Ann Sheridan's Nora is not a vicious user, pushed close to cartoon character, as is Joan Bennett's Katherine March. She doesn't have an angle. She seems genuinely capable of loving Dr. Talbot for himself. His attraction to her is completely credible. Chris Cross has to be too naive to fall for callous Katherine March; Dr. Talbot only has to be a normal guy who feels an attraction to women to fall for Nora.Fritz Lang would top most great directors lists, while Vincent Sherman wouldn't appear on them at all. Still, nobody ever said Sherman couldn't fly. And with James Wong Howe in the copilot seat as Director of Photography, the look and feel of Nora Prentiss are top notch, and occasionally striking. The visuals of the final scene between Nora and Dr. Talbot have an unsettling, horror-like nuance that made me think of Seconds -- another great Wong DP job.This film hit a nerve with me as a casual viewer, first time I saw it, because serious dramatic films in which disfigurement played a part were all but nonexistent. --Especially so in films from Golden Age Hollywood, which seemed built as a towering facade of hunks and babes. Hollywood was so uncomfortable with this topic that, outside a hand full of horror films (like Tod Brownings' films with Lon Chaney Sr.), it was virtually never addressed, and less so after the silent era. There is some kind of shock in finding a film from 1947 that features this as a critical plot pivot.9 of 10 stars. It never exactly goes for the grit, as Scarlet Street does. But what it delivers is, nonetheless, a peerless noir portrait of desperation and one's own nature fatally betraying self. For that, you have to consider it worth your while if you are more than a lukewarm devotee of the genre.

**SPOILERS** Straight laced at his practice as a big city, San Francisco, doctor and wonderful family man Richard Talbot, Kent Smith,has never done anything more serious in his life then being late at his doctors office. That was all to change when one evening going to his car he ran into singer Nora Prentiss, Ann Sheridan. Nora has a fainting spell falling on the street and bruising herself. Bringing Nora up to his office Richard after treating her starts to slowly fall madly in love with Nora. That leads to him throwing away his very successful practice his family, wife and two children, and later even his life, which in the movie he loses twice. Where in the end Richard faces the California gas chamber for first degree murder. The movie "Nora Prentiss" is about a mans obsession. That obsession leads him into such depths of depression and depravity that he destroys everything he held near and dear to himself in order to keep the woman, Nora Prentiss, that drove him into this madness and in the end loses her as well. Nora for her part is totally unaware of how far her lover was willing to go to keep her from disappearing out of his life. Spending money like crazy on Nora and using the excuse of working late at the office so that his wife Lucy, Rosemary DeCamp, won't suspect his almost nightly lateness from home Richard is still very reluctant to divorce his wife, on what possible grounds? Then like heaven sent a patient of his Walter Bailey, John Ridgely, who not only fits Richards hight and weight but is even Richard's age,43, pops into his office one night and collapses and dies from a heart attack! Going to call the police to pick up the body Richard get this bright idea to switch identities and thus bury his past, as Dr. Richard Talbot, and start a new life as whoever he chooses with who he feels is the love of his life Nora Prentiss. Nora who was leaving for New York for a job as a singer at the Sea Gull Cafe run by her very close friend and former employer Phil Dinardo,Robert Alda, runs into Richard who excitedly tells Nora that he's divorcing his wife and within weeks when his divorce papers go through they'll be able to get married. Rchard in fact disposed of Bailey's body with his wedding ring on him to make it look like he was the one who was killed. In New York living like a fugitive from the law Richard has Nora becomes a bit annoyed of his constant secrecy and avoidance of people. It soon gets to the point where she's forced to live with Richard in a hotel room and only having her job at Phil's nightclub as the only contact with the outside world. Richard, now calling himself Robert Tompson, for his part constantly keeps up with the news back home in San Francisco and learns that his "death" is being investigated by the police as a murder suspect with evidence found at his office; The cops found a letter of divorce that he partly burned that's interpreted as a blackmail note. Also at the accident scene the police found a can of gasoline with his fingerprints on it. Richard finally lose it when he finds Nora, who by then he already confessed what he did, in her dressing room with Phil! That has him go into a jealous rage and attacks the startled nightclub owner. This causes the police to chase Richard all through the streets of Manhattan ending up in a fiery accident in Central Park with his face badly burned. With Phil not pressing charges and Richard getting a face-over, plastic surgery, it now looks like he and Nora can finally get married and put his life as Doctor Richard Talbot behind him. It's then his being fingerprinted by the police for car theft and those fingerprints matched those back in San Franciso on the can of gasoline come up as a match! This made Richard the number one suspect in his own murder! how's that for ultimate justice. Now with nothing to look forward to with his wife and family as well as Nora out of his life forever Richard, or as he's known now as Robert Thompson, can only sit in his dark prison cell and count the days leading up to his scheduled execution. He can also see what a mess he made of his life by reaching for something that he should have known was well out of his reach Nora Prentiss.