Available on dual-format Blu-Ray/DVD

There is no such thing as a free gift.  Mr and Mrs Palmer (Lizabeth Scott and Arthur Kennedy) are driving at night in their distinctive convertible Buick Special.  They ought to know better.  When they meet another car on a lonely stretch of road a bag of dirty money is tossed into the back seat courtesy of mistaken identity.  She is ambitious and fed up of other people sneering.  It’s a life of down payments and instalments, it seems the middle-class ‘poor’ are always with us.

Jane Palmer morphs into Lady Macbeth and no way is she intending to hand in the stash to the police.  It’s like the denouement from Breaking Bad.  The villain (Dan Duryea) catches up with her and wants the money back but (maybe for sexual favours) will split it with her.  Jane is keen to make herself over and although not impressed with Duryea – ‘what do they call you, apart from stupid?’ she asks – she realises that he is her escape.

Although much of the pacing of this minor noir is slow and the acting a little stiff (sometimes the actors look like they are on casters as they glide from one side of the room to another) the key attraction here is Lizabeth Scott; although Duryea was by far the bigger star.  Embodying a blend of the niceness of June Alyson and the huffy contempt of Lauren Bacall, Scott gives a riveting performance as she plots and schemes to keep the money even if it means a little murder along the way.  ‘You’re quite a gal,’ says Duryea’s character, and she is willing to risk everything to prove it.

Then the husband’s buddy Don Blake (Don DeFore) gets in on the action and there is lot of business with a left luggage ticket which will lead the finder to the stashed greenbacks.  As in so many noirs of the period it’s the female lead who is of most interest and the literally and metaphorically buttoned-up Scott carries the picture.  It’s a role that might have gone to Joan Crawford who would have torn the doors off the hinges to get the money and she might have made the film move with a bit more zip.  But Scott’s playing is Frigidaire cool.  Her coldblooded plotting so appalls Duryea’s sleazeball that he turns to drink.  ‘Don’t ever change,’ he tells her, ‘I don’t think I’d like it if you had a heart!’  But the two need each other and tear off to Mexico with their ill-gotten fifties and twenties pursued by Blake.

Director Haskin was more at home with action westerns and sci-fi.  For all that, there’s a very dark heart at the centre of this movie and the twist at the end is horribly inevitable.