Two genres: Horror and Porn have one characteristic in common: a morbid approach to the subject matter. Allied Artists' relatively obscure 1956 release "The Come On" is late-period film noir, like Welles' "Touch of Evil" coming several years after the post-war genre was dwindling, but is singularly morbid and fatalistic in its approach.
With Anne Baxter and Sterling Hayden as the star-crossed lovers (plus veteran John Hoyt a rather amazing villain), the movie is bookended by visually arresting scenes set on a remote beach in Mexico, where Anne and Sterling first meet and finally face their inevitable fate, staged in an idyllic way that contrasts with the traditional look and mood of noir.
Her casting is a key to the movie's success. She begins the movie looking very sexy in her bathing suit, conjuring up any number of 1950s blonde bombshells like Mamie Van Doren, Anita Ekberg, Greta Thyssen or Juli Reding. But instead we have the Oscar-winning Anne Baxter, just as sexy without pinup credentials, and providing the powerful acting her bustier peers could not dream of bringing to the role of a classic femme fatale that screams "lovely but deadly".
With many, many plot twists that are increasingly hard to swallow, the movie verges on fantasy by film's end. It is notable in its emphasis on misogyny, with every male character an exteme example of male chauvinist. Hayden's opening scene on the beach plays like textbook sexual harassment, and Anne's relationship with heavy John Hoyt is an amazingly morbid portrait of codependecny created by his domination/submission approach to her. Even the private eye played so well by a well-cast Jesse White manipulates Anne unmercifully.
After watching this rather strange movie, I was surprised at how obscure its filmmakers were: director Russell Birdwell directed a couple of early talkies (in 1929 and 1933) and then this film and the even stranger "The Girl in the Kremlin" (with Lex Barker and Zsa Zsa Gabor!) almost three decades later -what a career gap! Novelist/screenwriter Whitman Chambers similarly has few screen credits, but is responsible for a true noir classic "Blonde Ice".
