Some things I liked some I did not.

One of the worst movies I've ever seen

The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

This is truly a pathetic movie--I watched it only because it has Rod Steiger in it and a lady whom I did not know and mistook for Marilyn Monroe. It turns out she was Diana Dors, a Brit who seems to be cast as the typical dumb but beautiful blonde. The director is hapless and does not know how to create tension. Steiger is awful and mumbles and stumbles through his performance (and he looks super fat here). The ending, showing grape fields and Steiger hoisting his young son while showing him how to eat a grape is saccharine in the extreme. The plot makes no sense: who would believe that the blonde would murder the mother in law, when it was equally as possible for her to have committed suicide (which she actually did)? Dors seems to have some acting talent but the studio and director seemed to have only one thing on their mind: her curves. She is simply not evil enough for the part nor does the script give her any good lines. The church is injected as some kind of holier than thou medium of truth through the priest: it all just stinks. Spend your time doing something else and give this lemon a miss.

Dark and brooding suspense Thriller starring Diana Dors.Whoever said that blondes were dumb has not seen Diana Dors as the 'Unholy Wife'! Giving one of her greatest performances, she plays the beautiful, but deadly wife of Rod Steiger in this marvellous and riveting Movie with a startling twist at the very end! Dors has an agenda of her own, and shows an adept ability at changing her evil plans at the blink of an eye to fit the new circumstances she finds herself in. Looking so good here, Dors has a way of making you want her to get away with everything she can for the handsome San Sanders played by Tom Tryon.One of two Films Diana made at around the same time, as a woman facing the death penalty.

The comment by Melvelvit also on this site is fantastic...and I think he is right. I have only just discovered this - yes - lurid thriller - made in the final days of RKO, and it is as much fun in a demented way as it is genuinely interesting. Now that I have seen the film again with Melvelvit's believable comments under my, er, belt, well, it might just be Rod Steiger after all, and not poor Diana at all who is the genuine Unholy Wife. All that (later) Baby Jane and Charlotte campery can be seen it its seed form in this well produced, decorated stylish dark mansion melodrama...complete with trashy rodeo handsome hick and lusty barfly floozies for added tarty extras. Imagine running a cinema in the mid to late 50s and having RKO call you once a month offering double features of any of these mix'n'match titles: SON OF SINBAD / THE FRENCH LINE / SLIGHTLY SCARLET / INFERNO / THE UNHOLY WIFE/ THE GIRL MOST LIKELY etc. What a life there was for some excited cinema goer!

Despite the BBC/PBS series Danger UXB, bombshells do not lie thick on the English soil. So, in the post-war years – the era of Jayne Mansfield and Mamie van Doren, of Brigitte Bardot and Anita Ekberg – Britain hastened to close the bombshell gap. Its most potent weapon was Diana Dors (née Diana Fluck). Sort of a bangers-and-mash Marilyn Monroe, with the same fulsome figure and cascade of molten-platinum hair, she was an inflatable doll who would soon blow up to Rubenesque proportions. She would become something of a joke, even to herself, as her self-mocking appearance in the Joan Crawford fright vehicle Berserk attests.But when we first see her, in a prison cell, in John Farrow's The Unholy Wife, her face is innocent of makeup and her mousy brown hair is raked back. Had she chosen to present herself less brassily, she might have been seen not so much as a sexpot but as an actress, and a surprisingly adept one at that. She plays the grass-widow wife of a long-gone pilot and lurks in bars cadging drinks from potential sugar-daddies (her workmate is Marie Windsor, in a stingy tease of a role). She meets and marries lonesome Rod Steiger, who runs a family vineyard in the California wine country (shades of The Most Happy Fella). But she's restless and sullen, left in the huge gingerbread mansion with her aging mother-in-law (Beulah Bondi) and her pre-existing young son while Steiger stays obsessed with his casks and bottles. On the side, she romances a hired hand (Tom Tryon). Her dissatisfactions turn murderous, and she hatches a scheme to shoot her husband on the pretext that she mistook him for a prowler. Alas, she kills his best friend instead, but comes up with a ploy by which Steiger will be convicted of the murder....The Unholy Wife is slow and moody rather than tense and agile; Lucien Ballard's color photography shows the dark, muted interiors that would later distinguish the Godfather movies. And typically, we lose track of Steiger's character under all the mannerisms he piles on top of it. But Dors, who starts out high-strung and abrasive, mellows down into a conflicted and even touching trophy wife maneuvered into homicide less out of greed or lust than by stifling boredom; she offers more dimensions than the black-hearted Jezebel demanded by the plot and throws it out of kilter. And at the end, the postman does indeed ring twice, which comes off less as a twist than a cheat. The Unholy Wife finds itself stranded midway between being a brooding marital drama and a suspense story, now meriting attention chiefly because of the underappreciated Dors.