I suspected as much last year, when I saw Pickup for the first time and felt like I'd been let in on this great secret. Sure he made the same picture over and over, but he did it so well and with such humor!  The Other Woman is no exception. Hugo Haas plays a film director who has a reputation for being too "arty" for his audiences, a fault his producer father-in-law reminds him of at every opportunity. Enter Cleo Moore, playing a vicious blonde with an unspecified DSM personality disorder and an unusually strong jaw, lounging among the extras on his movie set. Haas's character gives her a chance to say a few lines, which she blows convincingly along with the only opportunity we have to feel sorry for her. Moore decides to take revenge on the director (for "deliberately ruining her big chance") by contriving to get him Rufied and compromised in her apartment. Which she does to spectacular effect.

It's a great de-escalation of morals all around. Terrific performances, interesting plot, lots of humor, and great fun. I don't want to ruin it for you, so please do see it if you get a chance.

There's a reason no modern audience has seen this picture: it's a real stinkeroo. I mean. Sterling Hayden in old man bathing trunks trying to exude animal magnetism? Not much. He was only forty, for Pete's sake but he was in the worst possible shape you can imagine; everything about him screamed cirrhosis. Now Robert Ryan is the  kind of gruff he-man with marginal musculature who could pull off the confident swagger required for this common, idiotic, noir meme: man sees beautiful woman he wants and to whom he has not been properly introduced, tells her she's the girl for him, kisses her against her will until she melts in his arms.

Sterling Hayden is NOT that guy.

And what the hell is wrong with Anne Baxter? She does a fairly sexy thing with her eyes and mouth, but it's not really the same as acting, is it? She's so over-the-top at all times that you keep hoping her comeuppance will come up already. In this lemon, she plays a con artist trapped in a relationship with older, meaner conman John Hoyt, who is a major control freak. Baxter meets Hayden on the beach one day while she's taking a break from the elaborate con in progress. Now, to me he just seemed like a threatening, gin-soaked tool lumbering toward her, devouring her with his rheumy eyes, and plunking himself down on her beach towel, but it seemed to work on her. The rest of the movie is about Baxter trying to escape Hoyt to be with Flabby McBigtrunks. She thinks the best way to do this is to blow up Hoyt's yacht with dynamite — you know, to make it look like an accident — but Hayden (to his credit) is aghast at the idea and nixes it.

Meanwhile, Hoyt has hired Jesse White (of all people) as a private detective to follow Baxter, which he does, and uncovers the pre-nixed dynamite plot by snapping pictures of Obviously Anne Baxter disguised in a headscarf and sunglasses carrying a package out of a warehouse with a 40 foot sign on it that says EXPLOSIVES, then another of her creeping out of a building blazing JOE'S ELECTRONICS or some such thing in neon. I kept waiting for the picture of her in front of ACME FUSE & DETONATOR, but no luck. These photos cause many problems.

Anyway, even though Baxter and Hayden have decided not to blow up Hoyt, he decides to blow up his own boat, fake his own death, and pin the blame on the two (you should pardon the expression) lovers.  It doesn't work out and everybody but Sterling Hayden dies. Like I said: p.u.

I loved it.