Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

Talking to a fellow IMDber a few years ago on the IMDb Film Noir board (RIP!) I got told about a great-sounding Noir starring Diana Dors and Rod Steiger. Hoping to find the title,I was surprised to not being able to find it on DVD or Video in the UK. Keeping a note of the movie over the years,I decided whilst doing some online X-Mas shopping,to have another go at finding it,and stumbled on the US Video version! Despite the postage price tag being a bit hefty,I decided it was time to at last meet the unholy wife.The plot:Moving to the US from London, Phyllis gets married to former pilot/now vineyard owner Paul,and has a son Michael with him. Over the next six years,vines grow on their marriage,which leads to Phyllis falling out of love with Paul. Looking for a spark in life,Phyllis becomes tangled in an affair with rodeo San Sanders. Desiring a fresh start in life,Phyllis makes a plan with San to kill Paul. Going out with a gun one night,Phyllis aims to kill Paul,but in the dark accidentally kills his pal Gino Verdugo. Running back into the house,Phyllis starts changing her plan to manipulate Paul,so he can fade into the darkness of the night for her.View on the film:Gliding across the screen, the alluring Diana Dors gives an incredible performance as Phyllis, whose seductive innocence Dors threads into a Femme Fatale ruthlessness of Phyllis manipulating Paul and San to play her tune. Looking back on her games in flashbacks, Dors digs her nails deep into Phyllis Femme Fatale state of mind,that Dors transforms from being devilishly mischievous,to life completely from Phyllis's face. Riding a wave of passion with Phyllis, Tom Tryon gives a swaggering performance as drifting Noir loner San. Setting off Paul's concerns about Phyllis's faithfulness, Tryon gives San an arrogance dripping with menace. Caught between Tryon and Phyllis, Rod Steiger gives a brittle performance as Paul. Worn down by the years of a loveless marriage, Steiger's brings out Paul's attempts to grasp of what little remains of the Phyllis he knew. Introducing the leading lady in a washed-out close-up,director John Farrow & cinematographer Lucien Ballard bravely contrast the glamour of the Film Noir with raw present-set scenes splashed with murky colours that subtly bring the bad times to Phyllis and her guys. Hearing Phyllis and San's plans on the grapevine, Farrow and Ballard give the flashbacks a ruby red appearance which brims a fantastic atmosphere of a "Woman's Picture" that has gone off the tracks into Film Noir,as scattered close-ups uncover the rot eating away in the vineyard.Mapping out the state of Paul and Phyllis's romance as she makes a plot with San, the screenplay by Jonathan Latimer and William Durkee pour a glass of cracking Film Noir dialogue,that is shaken with a harsh pessimism and jet-black comedic one-liners. Whilst having to go for a "spiritual" ending that the Hays Code would accept, the writers make Phyllis's journey to the spirit world be one that takes a wrong turn to merciless desire for murder,and a calculating Femme Fatale knife edge,where the unholy wife stands.

Dark and brooding suspense Thriller starring Diana Dors.Whoever said that blondes were dumb has not seen Diana Dors as the 'Unholy Wife'! Giving one of her greatest performances, she plays the beautiful, but deadly wife of Rod Steiger in this marvellous and riveting Movie with a startling twist at the very end! Dors has an agenda of her own, and shows an adept ability at changing her evil plans at the blink of an eye to fit the new circumstances she finds herself in. Looking so good here, Dors has a way of making you want her to get away with everything she can for the handsome San Sanders played by Tom Tryon.One of two Films Diana made at around the same time, as a woman facing the death penalty.

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.