Temptation (1946)

Temptation (1946) is a shady lady femme fatale scheming wife and marital infidelity historical flashback and voiceover lousy Egyptologically obsessed husband brooding jealous and lust based on a play film noir murder melodrama starring Merle Oberon, Paul Lukas, George Brent and Charles Korvin.

Temptation (1946) is not merely an adaptation of the old theatrical war horse Bella Donna (1915), nor is it some modest colonial melodrama content to expire politely beneath the dust of its own stage origins. It is a calculated exercise in moral corrosion, sartorial domination, and erotic opportunism, with Merle Oberon advancing through the film like a beautifully dressed indictment of every man foolish enough to confuse elegance with virtue.

The material had already travelled through stage and screen history before arriving here, having been associated with Alla Nazimova theatrically and with Pola Negri and Mary Ellis cinematically. Yet Oberon does not simply inherit the role of Ruby, she seizes it, refashions it, and makes it glacially her own.

Ruby is not a woman who falls from grace, since the film makes it brutally clear that grace was never her native territory. She enters respectability like an infiltrator entering a city under cover of fog, armed with beauty, calculation, and an almost aristocratic talent for emotional fraud.

Merle Oberon is ideally cast because her screen presence thrives on ambiguity. She possesses that rare combination of mystery and restraint, a subdued sensuality that refuses vulgar display while still making every room appear morally endangered by her arrival.

The film understands this, and it worships her accordingly. Lucien Ballard’s celebrated “Obie” light flatters Oberon with such devotional precision that one feels the camera itself has been recruited into her conspiracy.

Orry-Kelly’s costumes are not incidental decoration, they are ideological weapons. Ruby does not merely wear gowns, she deploys them, each one a textile argument for seduction, social ascent, and the annihilation of masculine caution.

This is why Temptation (1946) often functions less as a conventional thriller than as a fin de siècle fashion tribunal. Oberon glides through Cairo in frocks so magnificent that the plot occasionally has the good sense to step aside and admit its inferiority.

George Brent, given the punishingly thankless role of Nigel Armine, performs the function demanded of him with admirable self-sacrifice. Nigel is decent, wealthy, devoted, and catastrophically dull, the sort of husband whose goodness becomes, in melodramatic terms, an open invitation to betrayal.

It would be easy to despise Nigel for his obtuseness, but Brent wisely resists turning him into a fool. His tragedy is not stupidity, but a fatal inability to imagine that beauty might arrive in his life not as providence, but as predation.

Charles Korvin, as Baroudi, supplies the necessary venom. He is not merely a lover, nor merely a scoundrel, but a polished parasite who recognizes in Ruby a related species of appetite.

The chemistry between Oberon and Korvin is fierce because it is never innocent. Their attraction has the nasty sparkle of mutual recognition, as though each sees in the other not romance, but permission.

Paul Lukas, immaculate as Meyer, supplies the voice of conscience with his customary quiet authority. He steals scenes not by force of volume, but by moral density, standing calmly amid the feverish intrigue like a man who has already diagnosed the disease and knows the patient will not obey treatment.

Ruby’s confession to Meyer gives the film its retrospective structure, and the flashback device gives her corruption the quality of a clinical case study. She narrates herself, but she does not absolve herself, and that distinction is important.

As I have written of such women before, “la tentation n’est jamais une chute, elle est une architecture.” Ruby’s sin is architectural precisely because it is designed, furnished, illuminated, and inhabited long before the fatal act takes place.

The narrative begins with authority closing in, in the person of the police, and then retreats into the past to display the machinery of disaster. This structure is familiar, even predictable, but Temptation (1946) derives strength from the elegance with which it stages inevitability.

Ruby has already been divorced under scandalous circumstances, and the film makes clear that her past is not a mere biographical inconvenience. It is the foundation of her method, the apprenticeship through which she has learned to convert male desire into financial strategy.

Her marriage to Nigel is therefore not a romantic accident, but a social operation. She identifies his wealth, his loneliness, and his innocence, then proceeds with the composure of a professional.

Once installed in Cairo, Ruby discovers what she should have anticipated, that security without excitement is simply another form of imprisonment. Her boredom is not tragic, it is vulgar, and the film is right to treat it as the beginning of further corruption rather than as an excuse.

Cairo, as presented here, is less a living city than a studio dream of exotic danger, drawing rooms, excavations, servants, scandal, and heat. The film’s theatrical origins remain visible, sometimes heavily so, yet this artificiality becomes part of its charm.

Irving Pichel’s direction is capable, measured, and sometimes too polite for the brutality of the material. He does not always attack the scenes with the ferocity they demand, but he maintains enough control to keep the melodrama from collapsing into decorative inertia.

The pacing is undeniably slow, and anyone pretending otherwise is practicing charity rather than criticism. Yet slowness here is not always failure, because the film’s pleasures lie in atmosphere, costume, performance, and the steady tightening of moral consequence.

There are moments when the script creaks like old stage machinery being dragged across a polished floor. Still, the machinery works, and one would have to be very dull indeed not to enjoy the spectacle of infidelity, blackmail, poisoning, and an Egyptian mummy’s curse arranged with such solemn theatrical appetite.

Suzanne Cloutier, as Yvonne, is the weakest element, though the film mercifully restricts her exposure. Her later appearance as Desdemona in Othello (1951) remains one of those casting decisions that invites bewilderment with both hands.

Far more intriguing is the appearance of Robert Capa, the brilliant and doomed photojournalist, who entered the production through his friendship with Charles Korvin and emerged on screen as a servant. His presence is brief, but it produces a strange historical electricity, as though reality itself has wandered into a chamber of melodramatic artifice.

The film’s resemblance to The Letter (1929) and The Letter (1940) is obvious and useful. Once again, the adulterous woman, the colonial setting, and the machinery of guilt converge to punish desire after first making it cinematically irresistible.

Dr. Mueller: We are now going into the tomb. The ladies should be careful not to touch the walls. They haven't been cleaned for 3000 years.

Yet Temptation (1946) is not merely a lesser echo of those films. It has its own cruel perfume, less humid than The Letter (1940), more lacquered, more costume-conscious, and more openly fascinated by the aesthetics of female duplicity.

The Production Code hovers over the drama like a sanctimonious jailer. The film may imply adultery, greed, and murderous conspiracy, but it must also make sure that punishment arrives, because Hollywood morality demanded that sin enjoy itself only on borrowed time.

This constraint does not ruin the film. On the contrary, it gives Ruby’s descent a ritualistic quality, since every step toward pleasure is also a step toward judgment.

Merle Oberon in Temptation (1946)

The murder plot itself is lurid, improbable, and entirely appropriate. Baroudi’s gambling, his need for money, and his manipulative pressure expose him as a man whose charm is merely debt wearing perfume.

Ruby’s complicity is more interesting because she is not a passive victim of his persuasion. She wants, she calculates, she hesitates, and then she proceeds, which is to say that the film grants her the terrifying dignity of responsibility.

Merle Oberon guilt montage in Temptation (1946)

Nigel Armine: Belladonna, a beautiful woman.

Ruby: It also means poison, doesn't it?

Nigel Armine: It has two meanings, like everything. Being a hopeless optimist, I might take the good one. To me, Belladonna means you.

Ruby: Well, let's see if I fit the description

One must not soften Ruby into a misunderstood woman suffocated by boredom. That is sentimental cowardice, and the film deserves better than such timid interpretation.

She is manipulative, narcissistic, and splendidly composed, a woman who treats respectability as camouflage and affection as currency. Her occasional pangs of conscience do not erase her crimes, they merely make her more dramatically legible.

As I must insist again, “je me cite sans modestie: la beauté de Ruby est une arme, et les hommes sont coupables de l’avoir prise pour une bénédiction.” This is the film’s most aggressive lesson, and it repeats it with savage elegance.

The men around Ruby are not innocent simply because she deceives them. Nigel is naïve, Baroudi is predatory, Meyer is perceptive but limited, and the authorities arrive only after the rot has flowered. What was used to tempt the audience into action as such? It were these lines thus:

YOU CAN'T RESIST IT!

Who was she...this woman called Ruby?

The men in her life sometimes lived to regret it.

Arnold Moss contributes effectively as the Chief of Police, giving the frame narrative an atmosphere of formal menace. His presence suggests that private passion has finally become public evidence, and that Ruby’s performance of control is nearing collapse.

Lenore Ulric and the supporting players help create the sense of a broader social environment. Even when the film narrows into drawing-room confession, it retains the impression of a world crowded with servants, watchers, acquaintances, rivals, and judges.

The soundtrack, at times, strikes its melodramatic chords with almost comic insistence. Yet this too belongs to the film’s old-fashioned pleasure, since subtlety is not always a virtue and melodrama that whispers too meekly deserves contempt.

The sets and black-and-white photography provide a richness that repeatedly rescues the film from narrative stiffness. There is shimmer here, and shadow, and a kind of studio-built grandeur that makes psychological corruption look expensive.

Oberon’s performance depends on composure, and that composure is devastating. She rarely needs to erupt, because her restraint is more frightening than hysteria would be.

When she moves through Nigel’s household, one sees a woman testing the walls of her cage and measuring the value of every person inside it. When she looks at Baroudi, one sees hunger discovering an accomplice.

Ruby: Men are just begging to be lied to... so I lie. They don't fall in love with me; they never trouble to know me; they just fall in love. And they're cheated by their own imaginations.

Isaacson: Interesting viewpoint.

Ruby: It's the truth! If I can have everything I want, money, pleasure, admiration, just by a little harmless lying, I'd be a fool not to lie, wouldn't I?

The ending has been called abrupt, predictable, forced, and rushed, and these accusations have merit. Yet even a rushed conclusion cannot entirely damage the pleasure of watching the film assemble its trap.

Indeed, the ending’s slight awkwardness may even intensify the impression that fate has become impatient. After so much elegance, the machinery of punishment descends with the blunt efficiency of a guillotine.

The film is not perfect, and only a fool would claim it as a lost masterpiece without qualification. Its theatrical bones show, its pacing sags, and Pichel’s direction occasionally lacks the imaginative cruelty that the material practically begs for.

But Temptation (1946) remains a striking and engrossing melodrama, especially for viewers who understand that cinema is not made of plot alone. It is made of faces, fabrics, shadows, rooms, voices, gestures, and the terrible glamour of people making unforgivable decisions.

For admirers of classic Hollywood, this is an entertaining discovery and a severe little jewel of poisonous refinement. It offers Oberon at her most dangerous, Orry-Kelly at his most sumptuous, Ballard at his most flattering, and a story that proves once again that boredom, when joined to vanity and appetite, is not harmless.

The final verdict must therefore be delivered without apology. Temptation (1946) is slow, theatrical, and sometimes overripe, but it is also stylish, sinister, beautifully dressed, and morally vicious enough to deserve far more attention than it commonly receives.

Temptation (1946)

Directed by Irving Pichel

Genres - Drama, Romance, Thriller  |   Release Date - Dec 2, 1946  |   Run Time - 98 min.  |