I have seen a great many movies that start out strong, only to faceplant in the first act and never recover. Then there’s the films that never really reach their potential until the third act. 1946’s Temptation is the only feature I can recall seeing which has a stellar second act bookended by subpar material. I’m sure I had to see other movies with this problem, but I can’t think of any others at the moment.
The film opens in Cairo in 1900. That is to say, an entirely set-bound and very British looking version of Cairo. The newly promoted captain of police drops in on Merle Oberon at her palatial estate. He shows her a unique metal box and asks if she has ever seen it before. It has a history of prior owners getting killed and relieved of its possession.
This encounter will motivate Oberon to tell a long story to Paul Lukas, a friend of her husband. Yep, this is another of those films where it is all one long flashback bookended by brief scenes in the present. Well, the present day of 1900.
We’re taken by to London a few years prior, where Oberon is a jaded widow looking for her next wealthy potential husband. She sets her sights on Nigel (George Brent), a wealthy Egyptologist. As soon I realized she was making plans for Nigel, I couldn’t get that XTC song out of my head for the rest of the day.
Oberon is obviously having a great time as a clever gold-digger. Lenore Ulric, as her maid, also seems to be having fun as Oberon’s co-conspirator. But the film really finds its groove when Charles Korvin appears in the second act as a fellow con-artist. She has approached him at the request of the sniveling daughter of an acquaintance. He sees right through Oberon when she tries to buy love letters the naive girl had written him. Korvin is so pleased to meet a person as good at deception as he is that he gives her the letters for free. As she tosses them on the fire, he says, “You just saved me thousands of hours of dull reading.”
That is a great example of the snappy dialogue I found to be this picture’s best attribute, especially in that stellar second act. Almost all the zingers are Oberon’s: “First you give me advice and then you object to me taking it”. How about when a servant who asks her what to serve for dinner tomorrow night: “We’ll have the same guests and the same conversation, so we might as well have the same food”. Or, in narration, why she snagged Nigel: “He gave me a brand new name for a badly used one”. Another line I loved from her narration, this one concerning that lovelorn girl: “Yvonne, whom I disliked from the beginning, because she was 17”. Please bear with me for just one more line, this time addressed to Korvin as she talks about her future with Nigel: “He will be awarded the Victoria Cross, which I shall bear like my other crosses.”
Appropriately, the movie takes on a darker tone as Korvin convinces Oberon to poison her husband over a long period of time. It wouldn’t have been proper for the movie to maintain its light banter at this point, but I immediately started wishing it would return to the spirit of the second act.
Temptation still manages to stick the landing, though it never fully recovers. Also, aside from the third act, I would be hard-pressed to label this as noir. Regardless, this is a movie I foresee watching again at some point, and is the best reason for buying Kino Lorber’s box set Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema VIII.
Dir: Irving Pichel
Starring Merle Oberon, George Brent, Charles Korvin
Watched as part of Kino Lorber’s box set Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema VIII.