Some might say it's under-exposed

I was recently looking through Tubi's selection of movies that are leaving the platform at the end of the month, and came across a title that sounded like it might be fun, so I watched it: Over-Exposed.

Cleo Moore, one of those young actresses hired for her looks who left acting early and died tragically young, is the star here. She plays Lily, who at the start of the movie is one of a bunch of women being hauled before the court because the place she'd been working at has just been raided. As in the movie Virtue that I reviewed a couple of months back, the various defendants here are given the choice of time in the clink, or leaving town. Unfortunately, Lily doesn't really have the money to get out of town, having just arrived in town and not even having received her pay for her evening's work.

On her way out of court, she falls in with photographer Max West (Raymond Greenleaf), who took the job of taking booking photos because he needs the money. Presumably he drinks and that's caused reliability issues with his normal photographic work. Then again, some of his "normal" work suggests seediness. Lily follows Max to his studio/apartment, where he realizes he can use her to take glamour shots, giving her some pay as well to tide her over.

The movie begins to get a bit weird here, as Lily turns out to be a good girl who somehow went wrong by taking a job where she did. She sleeps on Max's couch, helps him with a client, Mrs. Grange (Isobel Elsom), who turns out to be wealthy, and decides she'll spend her time learning how to become a photographer herself, getting good at it fairly quickly. Eventually, she outgrows Max and needs to go to the big city to try to make it on her own.

In New York, she takes her portfolio to a news agency, but she accidentally gets knocked down by one of the agency's reporters, Russ Bassett (Richard Crenna). The two are going to fall in love along the way, but that's not really the point of the movie. Lily insists on making it on her own, even stopping to take photos of a burning building in the hopes she can sell the photos to the news services. All she gets is a job at one of those high-end nightclubs where back in the day they hired pretty women to take souvenir photos of the patrons.

One night at the club, she accidentally gets bumped into, screwing up a photo. That photo happens to be of an attorney who defends members of the crime syndicate, and in the background is one of those crime syndicate members. The next morning, it's revealed there was a murder, and the guy in the background of the photo could be a suspect, except that as a crime boss he can pay a whole bunch of people to produce phony alibis. Or could if there weren't photographic evidence, not that he knows about Lily's photo.

Lily rises in the world of photography, calling herself Lila because it sounds more elegant, while Russ tries to get her a good job with the agency. Eventually he gets the agency to offer her a job as his personal photographer while he becomes an international roving correspondent. Shockingly, she refuses! And then, Mrs. Grange shows up at the club where she still works, only to suffer a fatal heart attack on the dance floor. Lila had taken the last photograph of her, but a less scrupulous newspaperman steals the negative to have that photo printed.

Lila then blackmails the mob lawyer, leading to the mob boss' henchmen kidnapping her and a completely different tone for the finale than you might have expected.

Over-Exposed is in B-movie territory, although it's really the sort of thing that, 20 years earlier, would have been a programmer for a studio's more established star. I could easily see somebody like Barbara Stanwyck taking on this role in her earlier days. But Over-Exposed was made in the mid-1950s, so we get a strange little sort of movie here, that goes in all sorts of directions.

The idea behind Over-Exposed is good. It doesn't always work, however, in part because I don't think Cleo Moore was a good enough actress. Not that Over-Exposed is a bad movie; it's definitely interesting and worth a watch. It's more the sort of movie that in the right hands could have been a lot better.