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Female on the Beach (Universal). "Come away with me to Los Angeles!" the wealthy widow (Judith Evelyn) implores. Her hands wander idly over the alluring mass of rented muscle that lies sprawled upon her divan. Alas, no cash, no mash. To make ends meet, Jeff Chandler has hired out as a sex shill to a couple of confidence gamesters at a California seashore resort, and when the lady starts pinching pennies. Jeff stops pinching her. He just picks up his muscles and walks out. That same night the lady dies. "I'm sorry," says Jeff, and waits a full 24 hours —whether out of respect or satiety, the script does not make clear—before he picks up another well-shaped pebble on the beach.
.. Joan Crawford, the widow of a gambler, has a soul as rubbery as Chandler's pectorals, though not so much in evidence. "Ben was older than I was," she explains, "and rich ... I didn't know very much when I met him, but what I knew I knew well." Jeff has a confession to make too. "I don't hate women," he mutters. "I just hate the way they are." "I wish I could afford you," murmurs Joan. "Save your pennies," he encourages.
She bites his wrist. He rips her dress off. Her eyes dilate. She clutches her breasts protectively. He kisses her brutally. She goes limp. Then slowly her arms, as if moved by a will of their own, go gliding around him, and her fingers dig greedily into his flesh. "Just once." she sighs a little later. "Just once."
Poor Joan—not even the censor can save her. But he can make it legal. Jeff, it suddenly turns out. was only paying a debt of honor when he drove the other widow to her death—and besides, the lady didn't commit suicide after all. She was mur dered by one of Jeff's jealous girl friends. "The past," sighs Joan, as she clings to him, "is buried under a lot of dead years."
All of which probably proves that, as far as the Hollywood censor is concerned, you have to make your lie before you can bed on it.
Footsteps in the Fog (Columbia) whips up the classic recipe for a melodramatic potboiler: mix two engaging scoundrels (Stewart Granger and Jean Simmons) with a brace of murders, add a pinch of blackmail, a generous helping of blue London fog, some bilious green Edwardian interiors, the clop-clop of hansom cabs, and allow to simmer for 90 minutes over a gaslight flame.
When the film opens, Granger stands bareheaded in the rain at a cemetery as his wife—very rich and too old for him—is laid to rest. His friends are touched by his noble composure in the face of tragedy. Then he goes home alone, glances at the huge portrait of his late wife, and his satisfied smile confirms the growing suspicion that foul murder has been done. The camera switches to the mansion's cellar, where Housemaid Jean Simmons, her wits sharpened by adversity, has just finished dosing some rats with a little of the medicine that was given to her ailing mistress. The rats are dead.