Poison Ivy (1953) ***1/2 The first of many French films in which American actor Eddie Constantine portrays hard-drinking, quick-fisted, womanizing FBI agent Lemmy Caution, Poison Ivy is an amusingly rakish contribution to hard-boiled crime cinema, with Caution coming across as a fairly lighthearted detective as far as the genre goes and giving the viewer an easy hero to like.
The story involves a sidetracked shipment of American gold in Morocco and an accumulating tally of corpses connected with the caper. Caution is assigned to sort things out and even finds the time, naturally, to teasingly romance mysterious nightclub singer Carlotta de la Rue, “the Poison Ivy Kid” (Dominique Wilms), who inconveniently happens to be the girlfriend of Rudy Saltierra (Howard Vernon, a familiar face from the horror and sexploitation films of Jess Franco), the sinister figure at the center of the gold and murder intrigues.
Wilms is as sexy as femmes fatales get, Vernon is a natural-born villain of distinction, and craggy-faced Constantine is the personification of 1950s tough guy charm as Lemmy Caution, a character who must surely be some kind of alcoholic considering how much liquor he pours down his throat before getting around to beating the bad guy and inevitably winning the girl. Audiences today might find Poison Ivy‘s pace a bit casual, but the film is a good time if given a chance, and benefits considerably from location shooting in Morocco. Recommended to open-minded admirers of things hard-boiled, Poison Ivy earns 3.5 of 5 stars.
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