Smooth as Silk (Universal, 1946)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After we watched The Piper last night (Tuesday, February 4), I had the idea to look through YouTube’s film noir files for something that, if not necessarily lighter, at least would be more grounded in humanity and more comfortable for my husband Charles and I to watch. I found it in a quirky little “B” from Universal in 1946 (at the tail end of the “New Universal” era in the studio’s history before it merged with International Pictures to become Universal-International and eliminated its “B” unit) called Smooth as Silk, directed by Charles T. Barton (two years before he would revitalize the careers of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello with Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, an unexpectedly good film which showed Barton could do comedy and horror equally well) from a script by Dane Lussier and Kerry Shaw derived from a story called “Notorious Gentleman” by Florence Ryerson and Colin Clements. It’s really more a film gris than a film noir (film gris – “grey movie” – is my term for a film that attempts noir but falls short either thematically, visually or both). Its central characters are insanely ambitious actress Paula Marlowe (Virginia Grey), who like Eve Harrington in a much starrier and better film from four years later will do just about anything to get a big part; and her sugar daddy, hot-shot attorney Mark Fenton (Kent Taylor, top-billed), who buys her a new bracelet every time he wins a big case. As the film opens he’s won his biggest case yet: defending Don Elliott (Danny Morton), scapegrace alcoholic nephew of Broadway theatrical producer Stephen Elliott (John Litel, coolly effective as usual), against a charge of manslaughter for having run over his wife when he was stone drunk. Between them, Mark and Stephen managed to talk Don into staying sober for the duration of the trial, but now that he’s been acquitted he’s off the wagon again big-time. Paula got Mark to take the case in hopes that in exchange for Mark’s services winning the case for Don, Uncle Stephen would give her the leading female role in his new play – only Stephen decides she’s not right for it. She rather wantonly and unscrupulously starts dating Don behind Mark’s back, and when that doesn’t get her the part she seduces Stephen himself.

While all this is going on, Paula’s sister Susan (Jane Adams) from their origins in the small town of Great Falls is staying with her and trying to land a secretarial job in New York. “I can type 60 words a minute!” Susan boasts to Paula, who replies, “Is that good?” For the first half-hour of this 64-minute movie we’re wondering when this film will offer us a murder, or indeed any other sort of crime. Then it happens: Mark Fenton brings a silencer-equipped gun to Stephen Elliott’s home and shoots him dead, then claims to the police and prosecutor John Kimble (Milburn Stone), who’s sort of Hamilton Burger to Mark’s Perry Mason, that he shot Stephen but only in self-defense. His real aim, as he explains later via a voice-over, is to frame Paula for the crime, then use his courtroom skills to get her acquitted, but thereby destroy her stage career and force her to marry him. To bolster his attempt to frame Paula, Mark brings over a cigarette butt and a bracelet he’d given her and plants them in Stephen’s living room, thereby blowing Paula’s claim that she’d never been there that night. Fortunately, Kimble is able to unravel Mark’s elaborate scheme and figure out that not only did he kill Stephen, he did so out of jealousy and not in self-defense. (I wondered how Mark expected to be able to sustain a self-defense claim given that he showed up at Stephen’s place with a silencer-equipped gun. Putting a silencer on your gun would seem to imply premeditation.) Smooth as Silk – a title we never get explained – would have been a better film, and closer to true noir, if Paula had been better developed as a character and had been more of a real femme fatale instead of just a “purpose girl,” sleeping her way up the ladder of stage success like Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter) in All About Eve (1950) and Nancy Ordway (Peggy Ann Garner) in Black Widow (1954). It would also have been better if cinematographer Woody Bredell had shot the whole thing in noir style instead of filming the first half in plain, brightly lit interiors and only kicking out the noir jams once Stephen gets murdered and the plot turns “dark” in more ways than one.