The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

This is a film noir style of movie which features Barbara Stanwyck as the wife of a hard driving chief police detective. Her husband always goes for the headlines and often gets them with the help of his department including Burr. Everything is going fine until - well this is where Barbara gets in.In the case of this policeman's wife, she starts getting involved in things she should not be involved with. Then comes the ultimate crime of all, she has an affair with someone very close to her husband. Then she feels guilty about it and can not get past it. So she steals a gun and guns down the man like a dog.To solve the crime, Bill Doyle needs help to get this cop killer so in a small role Stuart Whitman is Laboratory Technician who gets the evidence rolling, though it takes the whole department to get the goods on Kathy Doyle. There is more to it, as Barbara Stanwyck is Kathy Doyle, Sterling Hayden is Bill Doyle, Raymond Burr is Tony Pope and Fay Wray is Alice Pope.

Hard-boiled LAPD detective Royal Dano, tracking a fugitive in San Francisco, rubs local reporters the wrong way with his failure to communicate, none more so than fiercely independent Barbara Stanwyck, whom he advises to go home and make dinner for her husband. She doesn't have one, of course, but she soon does after falling in lust with Dano's stolid but hunky sidekick Sterling Hayden.Marry in haste, repent at leisure. The dullest audience member can see this is a bad idea. After the life of a suburban LA housewife has driven her literally to tears, Stanwyck devotes her Lady Macbethian wiles to advancing her hubby's career ahead of that of his superior officer. These machinations involve police commissioner Raymond Burr and his wife Fay Wray. Yes, Kong's crush is now married to Perry Mason.Needless to say, all does not end well here. The cast alone would make this film worth a look, but it has many other virtues, including a slick professionalism and enough twists and turns to keep things moving along without any filler or padding. Although feminism and women's liberation were not in the general public's consciousness until the 60s, one can see their roots in many 50s films. If there is a Film Studies course somewhere entitled Proto-feminism in Film Noir, and there probably is, this would be right up there as subject matter along with various other films featuring Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, Ida Lupino et al. Not that it preaches about it, just something there as a springboard for Stanwyck's actions.

Barbara Stanwyck is a bored reporter and Sterline Hayden is a Los Angeles detective. They meet. They have dinner at a restaurant. The next day, deeply in love, they're legally married. Well, it happens in the movies.Stanwyck had an alluring persona in the 30s and 40s, a shady vulnerability. By 1957 she was past her prime and although she turns in one of her better performances there's no longer any mystery about her. The rigid rules of grooming have given her an unflattering hair style and that doesn't help.Hayden was tall and rough sounding. He never made it to the Mount Rushmore of Hollywood's he-men -- John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, and the like -- but he was never much interested in acting anyway. He was a he-man in real life, disdainful of college-educated elites. The day I was discharged from the Coast Guard an ad by Hayden appeared in one of the San Francisco papers. He needed young people to "man and woman" his yacht on a cruise to Europe, no experience necessary. "Come aboard and have a Baltic ball." (I'm not making that up.) I was young and experienced and tempted to apply. Seven years after this film, he demonstrated that he could act after all as General Jack D. Ripper in "Dr. Strangelove." Anyway -- yes, the film. So the happy couple are married and living in Los Angeles. They live in a box-like house in a residential neighborhood made of box-like houses, each surrounded by a neatly trimmed hedge. Well, maybe not so happy after all. Stanwyck finds that at gatherings of the LAPD families, then men sit and play cards in one room while their wives cheerfully gossip in another. And Stanwyck, a working reporter, finds no place for herself. It's as if she's landed in a community full of pod people. It's this kind of stifling conformity that led to the Beatniks around the same time.Stanwyck's sometimes coarse, hysterical discontent is the focus of the first half of the movie, and it's pretty dull. It's a domestic drama. The fact that Hayden is a detective and that Stanwyck's machinations get him promoted isn't really relevant. Hayden may as well be working at Amalgamated Nuts and Bolts.There's also a discontinuity in the plot. Stanwyck is suddenly obsessed with her husband's advancement in the department whereas, earlier, the only thing she longed to do was to get him the hell out of the LAPD. Even as an Inspector, Hayden will still be one of the flock, surrounded by the same chattering nincompoops.She winds up doing everything she can to have Hayden promoted to Inspector, "the boss," including selling her body and committing murder. It doesn't work.

A devoted columnist for a large San Francisco newspaper, Barbara Stanwyck has forgone marriage and romance to have a career. But when Los Angeles police detective Sterling Hayden comes to town on a case, sparks fly between the two of them, and they impulsively marry. Stanwyck relocates to Los Angeles and finds the mediocrity of her existence not to her liking at all, and that includes instant resentment towards the wives of Hayden's co-workers, lead by chatty Virginia Grey. Certainly, these "Ladies who Lunch" types would get on the nerves of an independent woman such as Stanwyck, and it becomes her life's mission to change their situation immediately.Stanwyck thinks like a ruthless businessman and schemes to get into the good graces of Hayden's boss's wife (Fay Wray), hoping that her husband (Raymond Burr) will look at Hayden for an important promotion. To get this to come to fruition, she goes as far as seducing him, but that's no guarantee that hubby will get the job Stanwyck wants for him. Stanwyck does what any other film noir wife will do. She resorts to murder! Not as ruthless as her 40's film noir vixens Phyllis Diedrickson, Martha Ivers, or Thelma Jordan, Stanwyck's character is certainly a strong woman, having worked mainly around men and seemingly preferring their company. Certainly, the women in her new social circle seem frivolous and flighty, and its obvious that Stanwyck would feel more comfortable playing cards with the boys rather than swapping recipes with the girls. So while the crime she commits seems to come out of nowhere (other than perhaps a mental breakdown gone untreated), it does make sense that the frustration she felt would take over and cause her to snap. Stanwyck, getting ready to move on to her television career (with only a few feature films left), is still a quite attractive, shapely woman, and for someone in her early 50's, she has quite a bit of sex appeal left. This won't go down in the list of best film noir thrillers, but Stanwyck's performance helps it rise above what was being done in abundance already on television.