The film begins in a hokey, low-budget manner, mostly to establish the debt David Janssen owes to Jeffrey Hunter for saving his life. Later, they do have some good dramatic scenes together, but it is Stella Stevens that breathes life into everything. She is seductive, cruel, ranting, crazed, and clearly bored out of her mind with her war hero husband (Hunter). The swinging couples that travel like a pack of boozed-up interlopers, completely insensitive to the strain in the young couple's marriage are a fascinating glimpse into one of the social strains of instant neighborhoods in suburbia. Times were changing in 1961 and these moments reveal the chasm between Hunter's and Stevens' definition of married life.
The domestic scenes and the crime/noir scenes don't really go together and I wish that the Stevens character had been included in the planning of the heist, the escape, or some other way that tied the suffocating marriage to the recklessness of Hunter. Maybe something that played up how Hunter was seduced by Janssen, Stevens, and even his secretary might have made that two halves of this story more cohesive.
The domestic scenes and the crime/noir scenes don't really go together and I wish that the Stevens character had been included in the planning of the heist, the escape, or some other way that tied the suffocating marriage to the recklessness of Hunter. Maybe something that played up how Hunter was seduced by Janssen, Stevens, and even his secretary might have made that two halves of this story more cohesive.