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Anne Baxter plays the hottie here; a grifter named Rita Kendrick hanging out in Mexico with Harley (John Hoyt), her abusive, drunken, aging pretty boy husband and partner in crime, but looking for a way out. In walks restless fishing captain Dave Arnold (Sterling Hayden) as the willing sap. Rita makes her play, and Dave goes for her in a big way. She arranges to hook up with him on his trawler, The Lucky Lady, and convinces him to help her bump off Harley but of course, the course of true love -- or whatever this is -- never does run smooth, what with all those incriminating letters, blackmail attempts, scams, crosses and double-crosses, dead bodies that won't stay where they're supposed to stay and dead people who apparently won't even have the courtesy to stay dead. But the real spanner in the works is the oily McGonigle, a mercenary slimeball if there ever was one, who plays them all off against each other, figuring on getting himself a piece of the action -- whatever the action turns out to be. It's hardly a lost classic, but The Come-On hardly deserves its current obscurity. White is a seedy delight and Baxter simply acts her ass off. The actual con is cleverly done -- it would probably take someone a lot more cynical than me to see it coming. The film ("The frank story of a woman who knew every temptation") was actually based on co-screenwriter Whitman Chambers' own 1953 novel of the same name which, at least on the paperback edition, referred to itself as "A brawling novel of savage love." BOOKS
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