Virtue took an awful beating in the week's films. To a woman, the heroines remained beautiful and bewitching as they sassed their mothers, neglected their children, poisoned their husbands, betrayed their lovers, sauntered in & out of jail, indulged such other foibles as highway robbery, adultery, shoplifting.
Temptation (Universal-International) comes about as close as the Johnston Office will permit in letting Merle Oberon get away with murder. Adapted from a musty Robert Hichens novel called Bella Donna (forerunner of the stories with spiced-up Mediterranean settings that used to run in Hearst's Cosmopolitan magazine), the turgid old yarn has been tried three times before in the movies. The verdict, in spite of its fine feathers, stylish production and highfalutin misbehavior, is guilty—too sluggish for 1946.
The picture's main concession to period realism: Miss Oberon's remarkable hourglass figure, apparently devised by an efficient studio make-up department to set off her eye-popping 1900 wardrobe. Merle plays an unprincipled baggage who succeeds in marrying Archeologist George Brent over the protests of Brent's worldly friend and physician, Dr. Paul Lukas. After a few days in turn-of-the-century Egypt, surrounded by her husband's tiresome scientific friends, Merle gets a discontented look in her eye.
While Brent goes digging in the tomb of Ramses V, she takes to lounging around in the incense-heavy den of her blackmailer-lover (Charles Korvin), plotting her husband's murder. By the time Brent's system has absorbed about all the slow poison it will stand, Merle suddenly searches her heart and discovers that her husband, after all, is the man she really, truly loves. With no alternative, the unhappy lady briskly feeds the knockout powders to her lover instead.
The father, Marcus, ostracized by his Alabama townspeople but dominating the town, is as fascinating a character as Playwright Hellman has drawn. Cruel-cold-blooded, with a sardonic wit and a partly pretentious feeling for culture, he cares only, and then half-incestuously, for his daughter Regina. His treatment of his wife, along with her knowledge of his guilty past, has made her a violent hysteric; his contempt for his sons, the power-craving Ben and the spineless Oscar, has made them bitterly hostile. The fiercest struggle is that between Ben and his father. Constantly defeated, at the moment when he seems finally beaten Ben ferrets out of his mother his father's guilty secret. Being enough to lynch his father, it is more than enough to break him. Ben now rules the roost.
With its vivid characters and its caustic, angry tone, Another Part of the Forest is more than just gripping theater. Yet it is not quite large-sized drama. It builds powerfully, but to something not big enough. After such strong-willed people have been locked so long in conflict, there should be some kind of explosion from within themselves. Instead, melodrama is catapulted from without. A tricking-the-trickster that would be just right for rounding off a cold hard comedy about mere knaves is a little short-weight for people as generally base and passionate as they are specifically greedy.