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Don't listen to the negative reviews

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

Talking to a fellow IMDber a few years ago on the IMDb Film Noir board (RIP!) I got told about a great-sounding Noir starring Diana Dors and Rod Steiger. Hoping to find the title,I was surprised to not being able to find it on DVD or Video in the UK. Keeping a note of the movie over the years,I decided whilst doing some online X-Mas shopping,to have another go at finding it,and stumbled on the US Video version! Despite the postage price tag being a bit hefty,I decided it was time to at last meet the unholy wife.The plot:Moving to the US from London, Phyllis gets married to former pilot/now vineyard owner Paul,and has a son Michael with him. Over the next six years,vines grow on their marriage,which leads to Phyllis falling out of love with Paul. Looking for a spark in life,Phyllis becomes tangled in an affair with rodeo San Sanders. Desiring a fresh start in life,Phyllis makes a plan with San to kill Paul. Going out with a gun one night,Phyllis aims to kill Paul,but in the dark accidentally kills his pal Gino Verdugo. Running back into the house,Phyllis starts changing her plan to manipulate Paul,so he can fade into the darkness of the night for her.View on the film:Gliding across the screen, the alluring Diana Dors gives an incredible performance as Phyllis, whose seductive innocence Dors threads into a Femme Fatale ruthlessness of Phyllis manipulating Paul and San to play her tune. Looking back on her games in flashbacks, Dors digs her nails deep into Phyllis Femme Fatale state of mind,that Dors transforms from being devilishly mischievous,to life completely from Phyllis's face. Riding a wave of passion with Phyllis, Tom Tryon gives a swaggering performance as drifting Noir loner San. Setting off Paul's concerns about Phyllis's faithfulness, Tryon gives San an arrogance dripping with menace. Caught between Tryon and Phyllis, Rod Steiger gives a brittle performance as Paul. Worn down by the years of a loveless marriage, Steiger's brings out Paul's attempts to grasp of what little remains of the Phyllis he knew. Introducing the leading lady in a washed-out close-up,director John Farrow & cinematographer Lucien Ballard bravely contrast the glamour of the Film Noir with raw present-set scenes splashed with murky colours that subtly bring the bad times to Phyllis and her guys. Hearing Phyllis and San's plans on the grapevine, Farrow and Ballard give the flashbacks a ruby red appearance which brims a fantastic atmosphere of a "Woman's Picture" that has gone off the tracks into Film Noir,as scattered close-ups uncover the rot eating away in the vineyard.Mapping out the state of Paul and Phyllis's romance as she makes a plot with San, the screenplay by Jonathan Latimer and William Durkee pour a glass of cracking Film Noir dialogue,that is shaken with a harsh pessimism and jet-black comedic one-liners. Whilst having to go for a "spiritual" ending that the Hays Code would accept, the writers make Phyllis's journey to the spirit world be one that takes a wrong turn to merciless desire for murder,and a calculating Femme Fatale knife edge,where the unholy wife stands.

From John Farrow, I had hoped for better.This take on the cheating spouse theme was uninspired at best. The pacing is almost languid. Admittedly, the whodunit aspect isn't there. But that doesn't mean the movie in question has to turn out like this.From the opening scene, the platinum blonde Dors (dark eyebrows and all) glides rather indifferently through this noctambulant drama. Her scenes from the post-murder flashback are admittedly a bit better. Steiger gives an earnest effort, but can't overcome Farrow's direction. Or lack thereof.East of Eden (both versions) was better than this. As was Unfaithful with Diane Lane.

Despite the BBC/PBS series Danger UXB, bombshells do not lie thick on the English soil. So, in the post-war years – the era of Jayne Mansfield and Mamie van Doren, of Brigitte Bardot and Anita Ekberg – Britain hastened to close the bombshell gap. Its most potent weapon was Diana Dors (née Diana Fluck). Sort of a bangers-and-mash Marilyn Monroe, with the same fulsome figure and cascade of molten-platinum hair, she was an inflatable doll who would soon blow up to Rubenesque proportions. She would become something of a joke, even to herself, as her self-mocking appearance in the Joan Crawford fright vehicle Berserk attests.But when we first see her, in a prison cell, in John Farrow's The Unholy Wife, her face is innocent of makeup and her mousy brown hair is raked back. Had she chosen to present herself less brassily, she might have been seen not so much as a sexpot but as an actress, and a surprisingly adept one at that. She plays the grass-widow wife of a long-gone pilot and lurks in bars cadging drinks from potential sugar-daddies (her workmate is Marie Windsor, in a stingy tease of a role). She meets and marries lonesome Rod Steiger, who runs a family vineyard in the California wine country (shades of The Most Happy Fella). But she's restless and sullen, left in the huge gingerbread mansion with her aging mother-in-law (Beulah Bondi) and her pre-existing young son while Steiger stays obsessed with his casks and bottles. On the side, she romances a hired hand (Tom Tryon). Her dissatisfactions turn murderous, and she hatches a scheme to shoot her husband on the pretext that she mistook him for a prowler. Alas, she kills his best friend instead, but comes up with a ploy by which Steiger will be convicted of the murder....The Unholy Wife is slow and moody rather than tense and agile; Lucien Ballard's color photography shows the dark, muted interiors that would later distinguish the Godfather movies. And typically, we lose track of Steiger's character under all the mannerisms he piles on top of it. But Dors, who starts out high-strung and abrasive, mellows down into a conflicted and even touching trophy wife maneuvered into homicide less out of greed or lust than by stifling boredom; she offers more dimensions than the black-hearted Jezebel demanded by the plot and throws it out of kilter. And at the end, the postman does indeed ring twice, which comes off less as a twist than a cheat. The Unholy Wife finds itself stranded midway between being a brooding marital drama and a suspense story, now meriting attention chiefly because of the underappreciated Dors.

As devoted to Blonde Bombshells as I am to food and oxygen, on first viewing The Unholy Wife I really wanted / NEEDED this film to be great. It's not - but DO SEE IT. Forget the plot and just absorb yourself in Hollywood's version of mid-fifties womanhood as a drippingly lacquered Dors, encased in silver lame', is unconvincingly rammed down the audiences throat as a heartless, lusting bitch. Enjoy.