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Coleen Gray aka The Good Girl:
She could play the bad girl if she had to (her drug-dealing nurse is easily the best thing about the underbaked THE SLEEPING CITY), but Coleen Gray almost always played a dependable gal in a pinch.
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She tried in vain to steer Sterling Hayden away from his final doom in THE KILLING, saved what was left of Tyrone Power at the end of NIGHTMARE ALLEY, and she helped John Payne wade through a river of thugs in KANSAS CITY CONFIDENTIAL.
Source: thenighteditor.blogspot.com
Cleo Moore was born on Halloween, 1928 in Baton Rouge. At 15 she was briefly married to Huey Long's youngest son, and had very likely already assumed the sort of undulating corporeal proportions that can make a guy break down and weep. She would eventually set records for the longest filmed kiss on live television, run for governor of Louisiana and enter the world of real estate before dying of a heart attack at the age of 44.
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Robert Ryan as Jim Wilson and Cleo Moore as Myrna Bowers in Nicholas Ray's "On Dangerous Ground" (1952)
But in the 1950s she was a star of sorts, the muse of eccentric Czech-born auteur Hugo Haas, slated at one point to star in a bio-pic of Jean Harlow, though I knew her only for her memorable cameo in Nicholas Ray's On Dangerous Ground (1952). If we shave off just one of its four titles, the recently released Bad Girls of Film Noir, Vol. 2 could just as easily be titled The Cleo Moore Signature Collection.
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Cleo Moore and Ida Lupino were co-stars in "On Dangerous Ground" (1952) and "Women's Prison" (1955)
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The girls in these titles tend to not be all that bad, and the films certainly not all that noir. Too transparent for manipulation, Moore didn't play the femme fatale. At the start of Haas's One Girl's Confession (1953), Moore's waitress steals $25 000 from her scumbag employer, hides it, and thereafter turns herself in.
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This strange tale of feminine self-reliance and the perils of coveting dirty money is highlighted by pleasingly bizarre plot twists and Haas's distinctive use of close-ups. It's a bit disappointing when Moore winds up content to be romanced by a horny fisherman, but in her private thoughts, conveyed through dreamy voice-over, she confesses that she's genuinely drawn to him. He has clean fingernails, she thinks: "From all that salt water, I guess."
Source: vueweekly.com Please, revisit my old post: Noir Tales