Evelyn Prentice (1934)
Another film only loosely classed as Noir. Whilst it may not be formulaic Film Noir
Evelyn Prentice could be one of those films that set the standards with it's storyline of extortion and murder that the genre would grab with open arms in later years. Proto-noir if you will.
The story is complex and riveting especially it's final twenty minutes in the courtroom. Evelyn Prentice (Myrna Loy) is a wealthy socialite married to famed criminal prosecutor John Prentice (William Powell). Evelyn gets mixed up with an attractive charmer who turns out to be a predator who preys on women as targets for blackmail. When he's found dead in his apartment apparently killed by Evelyn, another woman who he assaulted on a previous occasion is charged with the murder.
The film's key points of extortion, murder, neglect and womanizing are tropes that were used throughout cinema and certainly crop up in Film Noir of the forties and fifties and perhaps even more so in Italian giallo cinema of the late sixties and seventies. The two stars Powell and Loy made 14 films together and are mostly associated with
The Thin Man series of crime films, the first of which came in the very year this was made. Whilst not in the same league as
The Thin Man,
Evelyn Prentice is still a taut, gripping affair that is well worth seeing.
Myrna Loy as Evelyn Prentice