This is truly a pathetic movie--I watched it only because it has Rod Steiger in it and a lady whom I did not know and mistook for Marilyn Monroe. It turns out she was Diana Dors, a Brit who seems to be cast as the typical dumb but beautiful blonde. The director is hapless and does not know how to create tension. Steiger is awful and mumbles and stumbles through his performance (and he looks super fat here). The ending, showing grape fields and Steiger hoisting his young son while showing him how to eat a grape is saccharine in the extreme. The plot makes no sense: who would believe that the blonde would murder the mother in law, when it was equally as possible for her to have committed suicide (which she actually did)? Dors seems to have some acting talent but the studio and director seemed to have only one thing on their mind: her curves. She is simply not evil enough for the part nor does the script give her any good lines. The church is injected as some kind of holier than thou medium of truth through the priest: it all just stinks. Spend your time doing something else and give this lemon a miss.

In this more-or-less re-hash of DOUBLE INDEMNITY, Diana Dors' Phyllis is a lot more sympathetic than Billy Wilder's femme fatale -which puts a very strange spin on things. As a wealthy California vineyard owner's wife, Dors sneaks off to the wine cellar to tryst with her rodeo stunt-rider lover (Tom Tryon) and decides to knock off her husband (Rod Steiger) but the plan backfires when she accidentally shoots his best friend (Gilbert Roland) instead. Things get convoluted rather quickly when a resourceful Diana sees an opportunity to frame Steiger for the crime. There's crosses and double-crosses galore with a satisfyingly ironic twist ending but what sets this film apart is the small scenes geared to humanize this murderess. In flashbacks we see that D.D. is a high-class call girl with a young son to support when Steiger inexplicably proposes to her. Later on, in prison, Rod confesses to his priest brother (Arthur Franz) that he never loved Di and only married her because a Korean War wound prevented him from ever having children so he saw an opportunity to take hers because he needed an heir for his Napa Valley dynasty. It's Steiger who's the real unholy "wife" -and not just because he's an adult male still living with his mom. A "war wound" could be interpreted as a repressed 1950's veiled reference to homosexuality. Once married, Phyllis tries to be a good wife and is tearfully thankful someone would overlook her sordid past to make a life for her and her son. But her husband soon develops a cool indifference and condescending attitude towards her and immediately puts the boy in a fancy boarding school. Because Steiger leaves her alone all the time in a brooding mansion with his invalid mother (Beulah Bondi), one isn't all that surprised she'd take a lover. For how many decades would she have to endure that? I realize there's a thing called divorce, and in no way do I condone what Diana did, but I can't help the sympathy I feel for her plight. It was her husband's initial treachery that made the whole sordid situation implode. Shockingly, in the end, the real unholy "wife" gets exactly what HE wanted: an heir to his vineyards with no wife in sight.Just before Dors is led to the gas chamber for her crimes, she confesses to her priest brother-in-law that, "Yes, Father, I'm truly sorry for what I've done." She's blessed, and if you're of a religious bent, you just know she'll stand before those pearly gates!Kind of campy (there's times you'll want to choke Steiger's mom), definitely over-wrought, and at times over-the-top, the tag line on posters for THE UNHOLY WIFE screamed: "HALF angel, HALF devil, she made him HALF a man! This is the wine cellar of the most respectable house in the valley. This is where she met them, made love to them, laughed with them at her husband ...the man who gave her a name, a home and a heritage...the man she wanted to destroy!" This lurid come-on doesn't quite ring true once you see the film. The Korean War (or his gaiety) made him that way, and it's what he did to HER that put the whole dark scenario in motion.Diana Dors, "England's answer to Marilyn Monroe", glows in the dark in this color-noir from RKO. Words can't describe the mind-boggling "Swingin' Dors" images on parade. With silver-platinum hair, diamond bracelet & dangling earrings -and a shiny silver skin-tight cocktail dress (very low-cut with rhinestone spaghetti straps) finished off with silver-sandal heels, she's a blinding heavy metal vision. Rod Steiger probably needed a can-opener to get her out of that ensemble.Added bonus: Marie Windsor's always a pleasure. She co-hooks with Dors in a tres bizarre nightclub and, lounging on bar-stools waiting to get picked up by dudes with lotsa dough, these ladies of the night are killer!****NOTE****What's up with the movie's title? It's gotta be an inside joke. What's strange is the fact that the sanctity of MARRIAGE and the CHURCH may be the only "unholy" things in this film. In the twist ending, the priest knows D.D. isn't guilty of murdering her mother-in-law, but allows her to be convicted and put to death anyway. Diana's marriage is nothing more than deceitful sham and (technically) the only thing the lady was guilty of was accidentally killing a man. She may have meant that bullet for Rod, but it didn't happen (voluntary manslaughter?). Either way it's an odd choice of role for RKO to give it's new sex-symbol star, the tawdry tale wasn't even entirely new to the public as it had already been a tele-play on live TV under it's original title, THE LADY AND THE PROWLER. The tale was obviously "ripped from the headlines", inspired by the notorious Woodward murder case that had recently rocked the nation after a Manhattan socialite used the cover of a neighborhood prowler lurking around their Long Island estate to kill her husband. Arlene Dahl's WICKED AS THEY COME also re-imagined that lethal scenario and the tawdry, glittery saga was eventually made into the TV movie THE TWO MRS. GRENVILLES with Ann-Margret playing the deadly ambitious former showgirl. Forgotten by nearly all, THE UNHOLY WIFE has at least one devoted fan!

Despite the BBC/PBS series Danger UXB, bombshells do not lie thick on the English soil. So, in the post-war years – the era of Jayne Mansfield and Mamie van Doren, of Brigitte Bardot and Anita Ekberg – Britain hastened to close the bombshell gap. Its most potent weapon was Diana Dors (née Diana Fluck). Sort of a bangers-and-mash Marilyn Monroe, with the same fulsome figure and cascade of molten-platinum hair, she was an inflatable doll who would soon blow up to Rubenesque proportions. She would become something of a joke, even to herself, as her self-mocking appearance in the Joan Crawford fright vehicle Berserk attests.But when we first see her, in a prison cell, in John Farrow's The Unholy Wife, her face is innocent of makeup and her mousy brown hair is raked back. Had she chosen to present herself less brassily, she might have been seen not so much as a sexpot but as an actress, and a surprisingly adept one at that. She plays the grass-widow wife of a long-gone pilot and lurks in bars cadging drinks from potential sugar-daddies (her workmate is Marie Windsor, in a stingy tease of a role). She meets and marries lonesome Rod Steiger, who runs a family vineyard in the California wine country (shades of The Most Happy Fella). But she's restless and sullen, left in the huge gingerbread mansion with her aging mother-in-law (Beulah Bondi) and her pre-existing young son while Steiger stays obsessed with his casks and bottles. On the side, she romances a hired hand (Tom Tryon). Her dissatisfactions turn murderous, and she hatches a scheme to shoot her husband on the pretext that she mistook him for a prowler. Alas, she kills his best friend instead, but comes up with a ploy by which Steiger will be convicted of the murder....The Unholy Wife is slow and moody rather than tense and agile; Lucien Ballard's color photography shows the dark, muted interiors that would later distinguish the Godfather movies. And typically, we lose track of Steiger's character under all the mannerisms he piles on top of it. But Dors, who starts out high-strung and abrasive, mellows down into a conflicted and even touching trophy wife maneuvered into homicide less out of greed or lust than by stifling boredom; she offers more dimensions than the black-hearted Jezebel demanded by the plot and throws it out of kilter. And at the end, the postman does indeed ring twice, which comes off less as a twist than a cheat. The Unholy Wife finds itself stranded midway between being a brooding marital drama and a suspense story, now meriting attention chiefly because of the underappreciated Dors.

As devoted to Blonde Bombshells as I am to food and oxygen, on first viewing The Unholy Wife I really wanted / NEEDED this film to be great. It's not - but DO SEE IT. Forget the plot and just absorb yourself in Hollywood's version of mid-fifties womanhood as a drippingly lacquered Dors, encased in silver lame', is unconvincingly rammed down the audiences throat as a heartless, lusting bitch. Enjoy.