The Woman from Tangier (1948) User Reviews

The Woman Goes To Tangier And Gets Stuck

[boblipton · 5/10 · 19 June 2019]

A ship puts into Tangier, and Adele Jergens gets off for a bit of sightseeing. She doesn't know she's going to be stuck there when the ship's captain steals 50,000 pounds from the safe, shoots the purser and blames it on him. Police Prefect Robert Tafur is inclined to shrug, but Stephen Dunne is the local representative of the the insurance company who will have to make good on the loss, so he pursues the case, and Miss Jurgens, too.

It's a decent Columbia programmer, if a little rushed. It was director Harold Daniels' first feature and he probably felt pressed to come in under budget, and it's clearly cheaply shot, mostly on sets with conversations in alternate takes. Miss Jurgens is quite a looker, and seems to have seen this leading role as her biggest chance since she went on for Gypsy Rose Lee, and she's quite good in a not-such-a-good-girl role. Even so, her roles ended up on the cutting room floor. She took some time off after her first child, then mostly appeared on TV on comedy shows. SHe died at age 84 in 2002.

Adele Jergens dresses up the stock footage.

[horn-5 · 14 September 2008]

It's in B&W, has a sultry dame, much crime, set in the 40's, and many dark scenes, so the biggest surprise is that somebody hasn't dubbed this "film noir", since that seems to be the revisionist guidelines of late. Whatever, any film that has the two leading ladies called "Nylon" and "Flo-Flo" deserves some attention just for that. This one has Nylon (Adele Jergens, born to play a character named Nylon), an American dancer fleeing Morocco after her employer gets into trouble with the police, and she stops off at Tangier on her way to Gibraltar, and that begs the question of why this wasn't titled "Woman from Morocco." $50,000 is stolen from the ship's safe and the captain tells the police that the purser was the thief and that he had to kill him in self defense, but the purser must have hidden the money before he got dead. The purser isn't in any position to make a disclaimer. Everybody buys that with the exception of an insurance detective (Stephen Dunne) who, along with the audience, suspects the captain of being the thief. With Nylon's help, he discovers that her old Morocco employer was actually the thief and was working with the captain. By: Les Adams ([e-mail])

Anybody who calls herself Nylon deserves to be on the run.

[mark.waltz · 4/10 · 8 February 2017]

Just seeing a top billed Adele Jergens gives you an idea of what you are going to get. A dependable second lead and "B" star, this Lana Turner look-a- like was better than Lana at delivering sarcastic comments and had a deadly femme fatal look about her that MGM's "lady" didn't. She's got a Jane Greer voice too, and that makes for a great vixen. By accident here, her character ends up in a theft of gold and a murder, and along with a string of unremarkable male co-stars finds herself in danger at every turn.

More worth mentioning is Donna Martell playing the type of role that Myrna Loy played in the late 1920's/early 1930's and that Rita Moreno played throughout the 1950's. It's relatively entertaining but often bizarre and convoluted. What this has in Jergens' wisecracks and sense of style, it lacks in fun character performances. Still worth a go for the post war international intrigue, even if it doesn't really strike any real cords of thrills and spark.