"If I had my choice," actress Claire Trevor said in 1950, "I'd rather be a bad girl in a good picture than a good girl in a bad one." However she may have opined her lot as one of Hollywood's go-to women of ill repute, the Brooklyn-born actress had the last laugh in 1949 when she received the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for playing gangster Edward G. Robinson's alcoholic gun moll in John Huston's Key Largo (1948). Change of pace roles followed, with Trevor cast as an undercover cop in William Seiter's Borderline (1950) and a young tennis player's overstepping mother in Ida Lupino's Hard, Fast, and Beautiful (1951), but she was back in a moll's minks for Joseph Kane's Hoodlum Empire (1952). A variation on this theme came with her spirited turn in Roy Del Ruth's Stop, You're Killing Me! (1952), a remake of Lloyd Bacon's A Slight Case of Murder (1938), both based on the Damon Runyon-Howard Lindsay Broadway production of 1935. As the loyal wife of reformed bootlegger Broderick Crawford (in a role intended for Danny Kaye), Trevor had a chance to play comedy for a change and a character whose heart really was in going legitimate. Contributing to the shenanigans inside Crawford and Trevor's Saratoga Springs mansion are Harry Morgan, Sheldon Leonard, and Ned Glass. Look fast for Phyllis Kirk (her next role was the lead in André De Toth's House of Wax [1953]) in a bit as a nurse and listen for Merv Griffin as a radio announcer.

By Richard Harland Smith