A Life at Stake (1954)
An out-of-work architect is drawn into a business deal by a magnetic married woman eager to insure her husband's life for a small fortune. As the scheme deepens and people around him start turning up dead, he begins to suspect he is being groomed as the fall guy rather than a partner.
Made independently outside the major studios, A Life at Stake gave a young Angela Lansbury one of her rare turns as a scheming femme fatale, years before television’s Murder, She Wrote would cast her on the opposite side of the law.
Background
A Life at Stake was directed by the actor Paul Guilfoyle, written by Russ Bender and Hank McCune, and produced independently by The Filmmakers, the company Ida Lupino and her husband Collier Young ran outside the major studios. Angela Lansbury plays Doris Hillman, the wife of a wealthy entrepreneur played by Douglass Dumbrille, who draws an out-of-work architect into a scheme to insure her husband’s life. Critics have long noted the film’s debt to Double Indemnity, with an architect standing in for Wilder’s insurance man as the outsider pulled into a wife’s plot against her husband, though on a far smaller budget and without Wilder’s control of tone.
What to watch for
Lansbury, more often cast as a sympathetic or maternal figure at this stage of her career, plays Doris as a calculating femme fatale, a role she took on only a handful of times before television’s Murder, She Wrote put her on the other side of the law for over a decade. The low-budget, independent production shows in its flat visual style, which makes the performances carry more of the suspense than the camera does. Jane Darwell, best remembered as Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, appears in a supporting role, a reminder of how far this picture sat from the studio pictures its cast had worked in before.
