Wicked as They Come
Directed by Ken HughesKathleen Allen, born Kathy Alanborg in a cramped working-class household lorded over by her brutish brother Frank, has learned early that beauty is a currency and that she intends to spend it wisely. When a beauty contest sends her from London's meaner streets into the orbit of wealth, she begins a calculated ascent through a succession of men – each richer, more refined, and more useful than the last. The contest brings her into contact with Stephen Collins, a wealthy older patron whose interest in her is ambiguous, and Tim O'Bannion, an American with enough money and moral flexibility to suit her immediate needs.
As Kathy maneuvers between Collins's quiet influence and O'Bannion's more direct appetites, the film complicates its apparent portrait of a schemer. Larry Buckham, a solicitor who knows where bodies are buried, and Sam Lewis, a businessman with his own designs on Kathy's trajectory, press in from the margins. Allegiances shift with each new rung on the social ladder, and it becomes increasingly unclear whether Kathy is exploiting these men or being passed between them. The film's London and New York settings underscore a transatlantic anxiety about postwar mobility – the sense that old class structures are cracking but have not yet broken.
Wicked as They Come belongs to a cycle of British noirs that borrowed Hollywood's femme fatale template and subjected it to English social realism, producing something cooler and more equivocal than the American model. Director Ken Hughes keeps the moral accounting deliberately unresolved: Kathy's ruthlessness is never fully separable from the conditions that produced it, and the film's final movements resist the punitive logic that Hollywood censorship usually demanded. It is a film less interested in judgment than in observation.
