Just perfect...

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

It's pretty dull for the first two thirds of the movie. Kent Smith is the dignified, reserved, highly respected, happily married, wealthy, and thoroughly bored doctor in San Francisco. Every day is the same.Then he runs into Nora Prentiss, Anne Sheridan, or rather somebody else runs into her and he takes her to his office to fix her slightly bruised knee. Kaboom! For months they go at each other like two warthogs in heat. On the screen, they are two people in love with each other. A cynic might opine that the elderly doctor has finally found a young lady who makes him horny, while the night club floozy has nabbed a lover who is a doctor and is raking in the shekels and who might even divorce his bland wife and marry her and allow her to live the life style to which she's always aspired.Sheridan decides it can't go on like this, so she takes off for New York. Inspired, Smith hustles the corpse of a homeless patient who has just died in his office, equips the corpse with his own identification, and pushes it off a cliff in a burning car. End of Doctor Talbot; birth of Mister Thompson, who withdraws a lot of money from the bank and chases Sheridan to New York.He grows terrified of being found out. He takes to drink. He holes up in a hotel while Sheridan gets a job as a night club singer. He begins to look like hell. He turns extremely, violently jealous of Sheridan.The ending, which medical discretion forbids me to reveal, certainly revives the interest of the patient who must be nearly comatose by now. A wild pursuit, a flaming car crash, the unveiling of the shattered face. But then the story completely implodes. Or -- well, let me ask you. Would you willingly sit in the electric chair in order to preserve the dignity of your dull family? You WOULD? Kent Smith is good at being reserved. He's always reserved. He's a reserved man. It's his stock in trade on the screen. He was not even unnerved when confronted by his wife after she'd turned into a black panther in "Curse of the Cat People." Ann Sheridan is okay although she doesn't really seem to be the seductress that the film wants her to be. She's more of a decent babe who is good natured and outdoorsy.

Scarlet Street is one of my favorite films noir. But seeing Nora Prentiss again recently for the first time in about 25 years, I am struck by a couple of aspects of Nora that make it superior to Scarlet, for this viewer.For one thing, Dr. Talbot's wife and family are pleasant enough. Maybe a little square. --But the home Talbot forsakes has nothing at all in common with the loveless, bitter home life in which Chris Cross is trapped in Scarlet Street. So by the end of Nora Prentiss, you feel, doubly, the sting of the mistake this films anti-hero has made in leaving the life he had, in doomed pursuit of the other woman. In Scarlet Street, the choice between life as a homeless, haunted drifter, and a life suffered in total subjugation to a shrew and harpy, could be seen as a toss-up.And for another thing, Ann Sheridan's Nora is not a vicious user, pushed close to cartoon character, as is Joan Bennett's Katherine March. She doesn't have an angle. She seems genuinely capable of loving Dr. Talbot for himself. His attraction to her is completely credible. Chris Cross has to be too naive to fall for callous Katherine March; Dr. Talbot only has to be a normal guy who feels an attraction to women to fall for Nora.Fritz Lang would top most great directors lists, while Vincent Sherman wouldn't appear on them at all. Still, nobody ever said Sherman couldn't fly. And with James Wong Howe in the copilot seat as Director of Photography, the look and feel of Nora Prentiss are top notch, and occasionally striking. The visuals of the final scene between Nora and Dr. Talbot have an unsettling, horror-like nuance that made me think of Seconds -- another great Wong DP job.This film hit a nerve with me as a casual viewer, first time I saw it, because serious dramatic films in which disfigurement played a part were all but nonexistent. --Especially so in films from Golden Age Hollywood, which seemed built as a towering facade of hunks and babes. Hollywood was so uncomfortable with this topic that, outside a hand full of horror films (like Tod Brownings' films with Lon Chaney Sr.), it was virtually never addressed, and less so after the silent era. There is some kind of shock in finding a film from 1947 that features this as a critical plot pivot.9 of 10 stars. It never exactly goes for the grit, as Scarlet Street does. But what it delivers is, nonetheless, a peerless noir portrait of desperation and one's own nature fatally betraying self. For that, you have to consider it worth your while if you are more than a lukewarm devotee of the genre.

**SPOILERS** Straight laced at his practice as a big city, San Francisco, doctor and wonderful family man Richard Talbot, Kent Smith,has never done anything more serious in his life then being late at his doctors office. That was all to change when one evening going to his car he ran into singer Nora Prentiss, Ann Sheridan. Nora has a fainting spell falling on the street and bruising herself. Bringing Nora up to his office Richard after treating her starts to slowly fall madly in love with Nora. That leads to him throwing away his very successful practice his family, wife and two children, and later even his life, which in the movie he loses twice. Where in the end Richard faces the California gas chamber for first degree murder. The movie "Nora Prentiss" is about a mans obsession. That obsession leads him into such depths of depression and depravity that he destroys everything he held near and dear to himself in order to keep the woman, Nora Prentiss, that drove him into this madness and in the end loses her as well. Nora for her part is totally unaware of how far her lover was willing to go to keep her from disappearing out of his life. Spending money like crazy on Nora and using the excuse of working late at the office so that his wife Lucy, Rosemary DeCamp, won't suspect his almost nightly lateness from home Richard is still very reluctant to divorce his wife, on what possible grounds? Then like heaven sent a patient of his Walter Bailey, John Ridgely, who not only fits Richards hight and weight but is even Richard's age,43, pops into his office one night and collapses and dies from a heart attack! Going to call the police to pick up the body Richard get this bright idea to switch identities and thus bury his past, as Dr. Richard Talbot, and start a new life as whoever he chooses with who he feels is the love of his life Nora Prentiss. Nora who was leaving for New York for a job as a singer at the Sea Gull Cafe run by her very close friend and former employer Phil Dinardo,Robert Alda, runs into Richard who excitedly tells Nora that he's divorcing his wife and within weeks when his divorce papers go through they'll be able to get married. Rchard in fact disposed of Bailey's body with his wedding ring on him to make it look like he was the one who was killed. In New York living like a fugitive from the law Richard has Nora becomes a bit annoyed of his constant secrecy and avoidance of people. It soon gets to the point where she's forced to live with Richard in a hotel room and only having her job at Phil's nightclub as the only contact with the outside world. Richard, now calling himself Robert Tompson, for his part constantly keeps up with the news back home in San Francisco and learns that his "death" is being investigated by the police as a murder suspect with evidence found at his office; The cops found a letter of divorce that he partly burned that's interpreted as a blackmail note. Also at the accident scene the police found a can of gasoline with his fingerprints on it. Richard finally lose it when he finds Nora, who by then he already confessed what he did, in her dressing room with Phil! That has him go into a jealous rage and attacks the startled nightclub owner. This causes the police to chase Richard all through the streets of Manhattan ending up in a fiery accident in Central Park with his face badly burned. With Phil not pressing charges and Richard getting a face-over, plastic surgery, it now looks like he and Nora can finally get married and put his life as Doctor Richard Talbot behind him. It's then his being fingerprinted by the police for car theft and those fingerprints matched those back in San Franciso on the can of gasoline come up as a match! This made Richard the number one suspect in his own murder! how's that for ultimate justice. Now with nothing to look forward to with his wife and family as well as Nora out of his life forever Richard, or as he's known now as Robert Thompson, can only sit in his dark prison cell and count the days leading up to his scheduled execution. He can also see what a mess he made of his life by reaching for something that he should have known was well out of his reach Nora Prentiss.

. . . Ann Sheridan, that is. And they didn't call her the "Oomph Girl" for nothing.She's worldly (mostly underworld) straight- forward, knows the score, and completely direct. What's more, you believe and trust her . . . nothing underhanded here.At one point she, as Nora Prentis says, "I may not have been handled with care, but I'm not shop-worn." That about sums her up.There's no other quite like Sheridan, and she can make a wisecrack in a flash, partly for levity and partly to hold off wolves. Furthermore, it works pretty much all the time.In "Nora Prentis" Sheridan's perfectly cast as a nightclub singer who walks into an affair with a married man. Kent Smith is fine as her suitor. Vincent Sherman's the competent director, and James Wong Howe's the fine photographer.We're treated to Ann's beautiful contralto voice (in a lovely ballad, "Who Cares What People Say") and to the rest of Warner Bros. stock company, including Robert Alda."Nora Prentis' " characters work because they're endowed with both strong and weak qualities. No one's clearly victim or villain here, just quite ordinary people who get trapped in tragic circumstances.