WICKED AS THEY COME: Arlene's been a very naughty girl

The entire premise of this 1956 melodrama depends on convincing the viewer that Arlene Dahl is so irresistibly beautiful that the briefest glimpse of her will turn grown men as solid, dependable and dull as Herbert Marshall into dribbling fools totally unable to control their baser instincts.

Measured by this self-imposed yardstick WICKED AS THEY COME falls at the first hurdle.
Miss Dahl is differentiated from the hundreds of other bottle blondes that Hollywood has tried to foist on us over the decades as the next Jean Harlow or the next Marilyn Monroe solely by the very prominent mole clinging to her upper lip.
Even minus the mole she's just another averagely attractive actress with few outstanding assets in the physical or talent departments and that averageness is just compounded by her character's lack of personality.
Dahl plays Kathy Allen, a poor but beautiful factory worker living in the slums of Boston, MA, who wins a rigged beauty contest (having bewitched the judges) and uses the prize of $1000 and a trip to Europe to reinvent herself and snare a man with the money to keep in the style she believes she deserves. 
You'll guess from the film's 95 minute running time that she doesn't snare him the moment she steps off the plane in London. She has to work her way through several other men first, including the dull and dependable Marshall before she reaches the man with the really big wad. But all the while that she's wrecking careers and marriages she keeps returning to tough-guy advertising exec Tim O'Bannion, played like a send-up of an actual tough guy by a perpetually trenchcoat-clad Phil Carey.
Kathy Allen is like Barbara Stanwyck in "Babyface" without any of Stanwyck's charisma or style. Her paucity of allure simply makes the men who fall for her look like even bigger fools than they're supposed to be.
The film, however, does offer plenty of other distractions to keep us occupied and entertained. They start with the attempt by Sid James to sound like an American, which is slightly more convincing than director Ken Hughes' efforts to pass off the suburbs of south west London as Boston, Massachusetts. Add to that the aircraft which changes model in mid-flight (the stock footage of the plane taking off and landing doesn't match the film of the aircraft in flight), and the beauty competition organised by a very smalltime fashionware trade magazine run by a dad and his son out of a basement but which manages to get its grand final shown live on tv. That might explain why the trip to Europe part of the big prize only goes as far as London and doesn't include paying for stay in a swanky Mayfair hotel. And did I mention the cast of British actors who can't sustain an American accent for the duration of an entire sentence? 
Shoehorning big name American stars on the slide into British made movies was all the rage in the 1950s. For the waning stars it offered the kind of paycheck they were no longer being offered in the States, and their name above the title helped British studios to sell their product in the US. But the two elements rarely fitted together comfortably. The American stars were just too big and too Hollywood to be convincing in small, cheap, drab British made stories with their low production values.  
There is a perverse pleasure in watching this mismatch in action. WICKED AS THEY COME has it by the bucketload and it's that which kept me watching.