The Scarlet Hour

6/30/2019

The Kiss Off. The Scarlet Hour is directed by Micahel Curtiz and written by Rip Van Ronkel, Frank Tashlin and John Lucas. It stars Carol Ohmart, Tom Tryon, E.G. Marshall, Elaine Stritch, Jody Lawrance and James Gregory. Music is by Leith Stevens and cinematography by Lionel Lindon. It has been a hard to locate film noir for may a year, which when you consider it's directed by such a titan of classic cinema comes as a surprise. The plot dynamics are very familiar to noir fans, and coming as it does late in the original film noir wave it does lack a bit of freshness, but there's little deviations in the shenanigans of the principals to at least give this its own identity. We essentially have an abused wife (Ohmart) having an affair with one of her husbands (Gregory) employees (Tryon