The leading ladies of the two-disc, four-film collection Bad Girls of Film Noir: Volume One (Sony)—Lizabeth Scott, Evelyn Keyes and Gloria Grahame—are indeed some of the great bad girls of film noir. It’s just that the films don’t show these femmes off at their most fatale and it’s a stretch to call some of them “noir.” Such as Bad For Each Other (1953), starring Charlton Heston a military surgeon who returns home (a mining town outside of Pittsburg) and falls for a flighty spoiled society dame (Lizabeth Scott) with a history of bad marriages and broken husbands. Which sounds more sinister than it is: she’s less femme fatale simply a bad influence, sucking the ambition and integrity of the men she pulls into her little world of money and distraction. Written by Irving Wallace and Horace McCoy (from a story by McCoy), it’s not a crime drama or even a portrait of social malaise or corruption, and whole chunks of the front-loaded narrative (Heston’s social-climbing brother died under suspicious circumstances and in a cloud of criminal suspicion) are left hanging as Heston learns how painless it is to trade his integrity for financial success as doctor to the neurotic and bored socialites of Pittsburg, and is jolted back out by the actions of a good girl (Dianne Foster) and an idealistic young doctor (Arthur Franz). Heston is quite watchable in a fairly lazy performance and but Lizabeth Scott doesn’t have much to do and the film get lost in distracting subplots that go nowhere, and director Irving Rapper can’t even feign a sense of urgency or gravity to any of it.

Edmond O'Brien and Lizabeth Scott in "Two of a Kind"

Two of a Kind (1951), also starring Scott and directed by Henry Levin with a better feeling for the world of scoundrels, is more satisfying, a minor noir with a fun performance by Edmond O’Brien as a career bad boy, an orphan who scams his way through life until he’s drafted by Scott and her lawyer partner (Alexander Knox) in an inheritance scam involving an rich couple and a missing child from decades back. Yep, he’s posing as the long lost son, snatched away and left to grow up in a series of orphanages and juvenile detention centers until kismet (and a carefully plotted scheme) sweeps him back into their lives. O’Brien isn’t so much charming as intriguingly confident and cool as a former carny who knows how to play a situation and is willing to lose a finger (a great scene) in a gamble for a bigger score, but has been knocked around enough to know when to play and where to draw the line. And, of course, he kind of likes the old man. It’s a soft-boiled noir with lots of tough-guy attitude from O’Brien (who delivers in spades) and an entertaining twist involving his unconventional romance with the niece of the old couple (Terry Moore), a sweetheart of a social activist who decides to make reforming O’Brien her new cause.

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