[I just posted this at my blog.]

https://areadingretirement.wordpress.com/2025/11/26/the-come-on-1956/

I first saw The Come On (1956) on New York area television in the 1970s. It is a fugitive noir that has apparently never had a legitimate home media release. The online print available at various sites (YouTube, Internet Archive, OK.ru, rarefilmm) is panned-and-scanned and in bad shape.

“The last surviving 35mm print in existence”, apparently also in bad shape but at least in the correct SuperScope aspect ratio, was screened at Noir City 11 in 2013. I am not aware that the Film Noir Foundation has done any restoration work subsequently, but I am going to try to find out.

Anyway, I watched the bad online print at YouTube for old time’s sake. It is a hoot! A lot came back to me from my high school viewing.

The movie opens and closes on a “Mexican” beach (actually Southern Californian), and everything in between is oddly, and probably inadvertently, exactly like the highly melodramatic Mexican noirs made at the same time.

The story wastes no time getting started, man and woman encounter each other on beach in the first minute, bam! We’re off to the races. The Mexican noir Romance de fieras is just like that – a murder in the first 90 seconds.

Anne Baxter as the femme fatale emotes all over the place, Sterling Hayden scarcely emotes at all, and oddly enough, the juxtaposition works.

Very much a beach and waterfront noir throughout, tons of outdoor filming, plenty of boats. Hayden plays a fisherman, and of course he was a nautical guy in real life.

The plot (from a 1953 source novel by Whitman Chambers) is convoluted but serviceable; there are plenty of noirs with screenplays much less good. A highlight (to which I was alerted by the blog The Evening Class) comes when a gay taxi driver says of Hayden, “I thought he was kind of cute!”

Without giving anything specific away, I can say that the ending is over-the-top operatic. This again is very “Mexican”. Mexican film-makers have zero fear of being ridiculous.

The Come On is well worthy of rediscovery.