This is really an oddball. I really wanted more from it, but viewing this is kind of like having an almost flat soda and trying to tell yourself it's still good.<br /><br />Two different movies wanted to be made here, a soap-operaish character piece and a police melodrama. All we got was a melodrama of the very bad kind.<br /><br />Where to start. Stanwyck's character acts in wildly improbable ways and is inconsistent. She starts in a newsroom doing the Ann Landers bit, and it SEEMS that she might want more--and is certainly capable of it--maybe a reporting job. Care was put into creating the newsroom atmosphere, including having a sandwich boy prattling on about sandwiches (and it's "Ike" from "The Waltons"!!!) and a lot of period detail. You think you're going to get some sort of newsroom/police drama. Uh, but no, the brakes are pretty much put on full just as you are getting acquainted with the atmosphere.<br /><br />As the film continues, it appears that Stanwyck gets a better job in NY. She is going to move on up to something better.<br /><br />Suddenly, the plot creakily shifts and we never see the newsroom, or the sandwich boy for that matter (hell, thought he might show up as a witness or something later on, I mean, this was supposed to be a noir, right?) Stanwyck, who doesn't believe in marriage, kids, or anything like that, suddenly marries a police office she barely knows and met during work.<br /><br />It's not 10 minutes of screen time between when she seemingly rejects anything but a career and is next going on and on about wanting to do nothing but darn Hayden's socks. No, I am not kidding.<br /><br />Then just as suddenly, she is bored of living with Hayden, her cop husband, and begins scheming to get him ahead in his career. If she is so bored, why is she not working? I didn't get the impression he would mind. But instead, she gets into all sorts of mischief, from staged accidents to affairs to get him ahead.<br /><br />In the middle of all these things, she wants him to transfer to Beverly Hills, where it would be quieter. How is that moving him forward? It's inconsistent with her wanting him to move ahead. When all else fails, she murders someone, as if THAT would propel them both forward. How could it, when the results of the investigation would send her to the gas chamber? Why was his promotion that important to her, to lose her life or freedom over? Just a few minutes earlier in the film, promotion was not important, it was a transfer to a dead end quiet job in Beverly Hills! Huh?!?! The whole thing doesn't add up, or make any sense at all.<br /><br />And one other thing, just what IS it with that huge looming drive-in screen outside their home? I thought that was going to play in somehow...maybe the noise coming over and bothering the characters, maybe masking an important sound, I don't know.<br /><br />Heck, just in my wonderings here I am coming up with plot ideas that could have worked better. This cast and story foundation deserved so much more than this.<br /><br />Very strange movie.