"I stole it... I am innocent," Herbert Lom says to Stanley Baker; one a gambling con artist and the other a rich businessman/secret criminal, both are connected to central star Ginger Rogers...
Baker's her supposedly single fiance and Lom a friend that bums money and steals jewelry, specifically a bracelet that ignites the alternate-titled TWIST OF FATE involving Rogers's real life husband/this film's love-interest Jacques Bergerac as not only a proud-poor artist but a different kind of Wrong Man, more a Mistaken Man...
This British production has a famous American (most do) and is set in Bergerac's territory of Cannes, so BEAUTIFUL STRANGER imitates the lavish melodramas from Hollywood's Golden Age...
Which is actually a shame since Baker, who would often play intense yet interesting, fleshed-out characters, whether bad or good, is somewhat one dimensional as the inevitable heavy, despite starting out romancing the hell out of Rogers before smacking her in the face....
Yet what the film's mostly known for is the pairing of Rogers and Bergerac, whose convenient romance includes flirtatious pottery-making (decades before GHOST) while the crime story, also including Baker's weaselly partner Eddie Byrne, gets secondary treatment...
And with future HELL DRIVERS Baker and Lom brimmed with raw, deceptive energy, BEAUTIFUL should have stretched beyond a marriage that wouldn't last the decade...
Yet it's still a neat 90-minute programmer, part noir but mostly soap, making this STRANGER a bit too shiny and clean.
Baker's her supposedly single fiance and Lom a friend that bums money and steals jewelry, specifically a bracelet that ignites the alternate-titled TWIST OF FATE involving Rogers's real life husband/this film's love-interest Jacques Bergerac as not only a proud-poor artist but a different kind of Wrong Man, more a Mistaken Man...
This British production has a famous American (most do) and is set in Bergerac's territory of Cannes, so BEAUTIFUL STRANGER imitates the lavish melodramas from Hollywood's Golden Age...
Which is actually a shame since Baker, who would often play intense yet interesting, fleshed-out characters, whether bad or good, is somewhat one dimensional as the inevitable heavy, despite starting out romancing the hell out of Rogers before smacking her in the face....
Yet what the film's mostly known for is the pairing of Rogers and Bergerac, whose convenient romance includes flirtatious pottery-making (decades before GHOST) while the crime story, also including Baker's weaselly partner Eddie Byrne, gets secondary treatment...
And with future HELL DRIVERS Baker and Lom brimmed with raw, deceptive energy, BEAUTIFUL should have stretched beyond a marriage that wouldn't last the decade...
Yet it's still a neat 90-minute programmer, part noir but mostly soap, making this STRANGER a bit too shiny and clean.