Dance-hall girl Lucille Ball helps roll Allan Lane. When he sobers up, she has a choice: jail, or accompany him to his place in the middle of Ecuador to be his housekeeper. She chooses the second.
And that's quite literally what she is, and no more. In fact, she's the head housekeeper since she has Steffi Duna helping her out, when Miss Duna isn't trying to poison her in a fit of jealousy over Lane. This is the peak of the Production Code Era, or the nadir depending on your viewpoint, and this remake of a decidedly pre-code movie has been carefully denuded of anything that might offend Joe Breen.
What makes this movie interesting -- besides the fact that Miss Ball's character is named 'Lucy' -- is that this might be the first film noir. That's a risky statement to make, because defining film noir is so difficult that even Eddie Muller, who should know, says that it's an attitude. But by the time people noticed the genre, a film noir movie had certain things that marked it: it was a crime picture, told in flashback with a magical realism attitude, set in a corrupt world, and the camerawork was derived from German Expressionism, with a lot of shadows. There was often a femme fatale and a clock.
This movie meets most of those criteria, particularly the camerawork. J. Roy Hunt isn't a name to conjure with, but he was a solid professional in charge of the camera on some fine A Pictures for Paramount in the silent era. He moved to RKO in 1929, and handled the camera for many of their important pictures, but after 1938 the prestigious movies went to other cinematographers.... not that RKO was producing many of those. Still, his lighting added a lot to many movies that might otherwise be forgotten. He was the credited DP on more than 200 movies through 1952 and died twenty years later at the age of 88. In this movie there are plenty of shadows.
The other key person here is the director, Jack Hively. In 1939 Hively directed five movies. Other years he was an editor. The flashback structure of this movie undoubtedly made it tricky to shoot, and someone with an editorial background must have seemed a natural choice for this B movie.
It certainly wasn't considered an important movie at the time, and the issue of whether it was a film noir is a murky one; over in Japan, Ozu had directed DRAGNET GIRL in 1933, and it looks like a film noir to me, Other sources credit 1942 as the year noir began, with THE MALTESE FALCON and THIS GUN FOR HIRE considered key. I'm confounded by a philosophical question: can a movie be a genre movie if it's the first one? Does the leader make a movement, or followers?
Whichever side of the question you come down on, this is a minor picture competently produced, even if the interesting stuff had been largely eviscerated. That, to me, is the heart of film noir: with the Production Code in force, the audience had to look into their own assumptions of how the world really worked to understand what the people on the screen were talking about and doing. They had to look into the shadows, and there are plenty of them here.
