"Pitfall" and "Nora Prentiss"

These are two film noirs from the '40s that I have watched online in the past two days. In both of these movies, we have a middle class white collar worker with a happy family life, who gets involved with a femme fatale, to disastrous consequences.

In "Pitfall", the happy family man is played by Dick Powell, who meets the femme fatale, played by Lizabeth Scott, in the course of his work, and he falls for her. She is not really a typical femme fatale, in that she is not portrayed as being particularly seductive; rather, she presents a wholesome image. In the end, he shoots a recently released prisoner but it is deemed to be self-defense, while the femme fatale is arrested for shooting the cad who has been stalking her. An interesting back story is that the script got the movie in trouble with the Hays Code, because the adulterer was not sufficiently punished for his errant ways. The director solved the problem by meeting with two of the Hays Code members, telling them he knew that they were both married and had mistresses!

"Nora Prentiss" starts with the main character being imprisoned, and the whole movie is then shown in one long flashback. He is a doctor who meets the femme fatale, played by Ann Sheridan, by chance when she is involved in a car accident. She is more like the stereotypical femme fatale, a lounge singer who can be quite seductive. There are more plot twists and turns in this movie than in "Pitfall", and we wonder throughout who the doctor has killed.

Both movies are rated 7.1 on IMDB, and that sounds about right to me, as both are entertaining, with believable characters. Both movies reveal the underlying tedium and pointlessness of the supposedly ideal American life, with the white picket fence, wife and kids, and days which are all way too much alike.