Well, there's a fairly complicated scenario at work here, courtesy of Catherine Turney, she and Jo Pagano having adapted Maritta Woolff's novel. A New York singer (Ida Lupino) travels to LA to visit relatives. Her sister Andrea King is being pursued by dodgy nightclub owner Alan Alda, but she in fact has an ex-service husband who's in an institution following a mental breakdown. Another sister Martha Vickers seems to have lost confidence (she is really one character too many who we don't really need) and brother Warren Douglas is getting in with Alda in a not good way. Over the hallway lives couple Dolores Moran and Don McGuire, he a night shift worker and she bored with her role as wife and mother.
Lupino starts singing at Alda's club and develops an at-arm's-length relationship with him, but gets interested when she helps a melancholic pianist, Bruce Bennett (the original husband in Mildred Pierce), thus taking us into an interesting story we weren't expecting. All through you get this great music from jazz bands, Ida singing (not actually her) and whoever's playing the piano stuff. It's a kind of film noir jazz musical.
Best bit: McGuire comes to kill Alda; Lupino slaps him around and sends him home. Best line: 'She wouldn't give you the time of day if she had two watches.'
With Alan Hale in the nightclub, William Edmunds (from It's a Wonderful Life).
Photographed by Sid Hickox and edited by Owen Marks. From that great year, 1946. According to the Warner Bros Story, audiences 'gave it the thumbs down'.
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