The whole story is being told in flashback as Dick Harland (Cornel Wilde) comes home from prison. You know he is coming home to somebody, but you don't know who, and you know he has spent several years in prison, but you don't know why, so this gets your curiosity up to find out how this mild mannered author got in this fix.
So the flashback shows Richard on his way to the New Mexico desert when he meets a beauty on the train, Ellen (Gene Tierney), who is on her way to New Mexico to spread her recently deceased father's ashes over the land the two used to travel on horseback. In a whirlwind courtship Richard marries Ellen, much to the chagrin of her fiancé back home (Vincent Price), who figures being thrown over like this will make him a laughingstock and hurt his chances at being elected D.A. Such a plea would make you not want to marry the guy whether there was another man or not.
Well, after the marriage, Richard finds out what a suffocating woman he has married. She doesn't want anybody else around the two, including Dick's brother who is recovering from polio and a handyman who has been around the place forever. She can kick the handyman out, but when she cannot get rid of Dick's brother by her normal passive aggressive methods, she turns to a more sinister plan. Slowly Dick sees her for what she is, and also he slowly turns to Ellen's younger plainer sister (Jeanne Craine) for comfort. When Dick decides to leave her, Ellen has one more card up her sleeve to make sure she has the last word.
The Technicolor in this film was gorgeous, and Tierney's Ellen may just be one of the more sinister and subtle femme fatales in all of film noir. Vincent Price, as the jilted lover, is great in what amounts to a minor role that just could not help but have gotten him noticed. As the D.A. in the courtroom scenes, he is electrifying. Cornel Wilde seems so-so, but then Tierney is playing the aggressive one here, so this is hardly a film that calls for someone to play strong opposite of her.
A side note - I read the original novel, written in 1944. Things left out of the film include Dick actually witnessing what Ellen did out on the lake, and her initial false claim of pregnancy to keep Dick quiet. The odd thing was that Ellen, a married woman, did not have the slightest idea if pregnancies could go longer or shorter than the normal nine months. I think I remember her actually going to the library to research the question. How times have changed.
So the flashback shows Richard on his way to the New Mexico desert when he meets a beauty on the train, Ellen (Gene Tierney), who is on her way to New Mexico to spread her recently deceased father's ashes over the land the two used to travel on horseback. In a whirlwind courtship Richard marries Ellen, much to the chagrin of her fiancé back home (Vincent Price), who figures being thrown over like this will make him a laughingstock and hurt his chances at being elected D.A. Such a plea would make you not want to marry the guy whether there was another man or not.
Well, after the marriage, Richard finds out what a suffocating woman he has married. She doesn't want anybody else around the two, including Dick's brother who is recovering from polio and a handyman who has been around the place forever. She can kick the handyman out, but when she cannot get rid of Dick's brother by her normal passive aggressive methods, she turns to a more sinister plan. Slowly Dick sees her for what she is, and also he slowly turns to Ellen's younger plainer sister (Jeanne Craine) for comfort. When Dick decides to leave her, Ellen has one more card up her sleeve to make sure she has the last word.
The Technicolor in this film was gorgeous, and Tierney's Ellen may just be one of the more sinister and subtle femme fatales in all of film noir. Vincent Price, as the jilted lover, is great in what amounts to a minor role that just could not help but have gotten him noticed. As the D.A. in the courtroom scenes, he is electrifying. Cornel Wilde seems so-so, but then Tierney is playing the aggressive one here, so this is hardly a film that calls for someone to play strong opposite of her.
A side note - I read the original novel, written in 1944. Things left out of the film include Dick actually witnessing what Ellen did out on the lake, and her initial false claim of pregnancy to keep Dick quiet. The odd thing was that Ellen, a married woman, did not have the slightest idea if pregnancies could go longer or shorter than the normal nine months. I think I remember her actually going to the library to research the question. How times have changed.