Personally, I love finding a film that stars beloved character actors in the leading roles. That’s the primary reason I was drawn to Arthur Marks’ film A Woman For All Men (1975) which is considered one of Marks’ lesser films. Not only does it star the great Keenan Wynn but also Andrew Robinson of Hellraiser (1987) and Deep Space Nine. It goes without saying that these two chew up the scenery with a voracious appetite. They don’t make A Woman For All Men a good movie, but they to add plenty of entertainment value to a curious anomaly in Marks’ oeuvre.
A Woman For All Men opens with Robinson finding out that his father has just gotten married in Vegas. Immediately Robinson is concerned about what this means for his potential inheritance. After some time Robinson and his step mother Judith Brown begin an affair. To get even with his son, Wynn fakes his death, catches Robinson and Brown together, attempts to kill Robinson but is killed himself in the scuffle. Bound by their secret, Robinson and Brown conspire to keep Wynn’s fortune for themselves and evade the nosy detective played by Marks stalwart Alex Rocco. However, it isn’t long before Brown plans to double cross her partner in crime.
Arthur Marks takes all of the tropes of a James M. Cain novel and opens them up to make room for his own brand of laid-back pacing and gradual character development. One of the most attractive things about an Arthur Marks film is that he creates characters that are as complex and flawed as real human beings. Some critics have said that this hurts the dramatic urgency of his films, but I find that it reflects the ebb and flow of that urgency in real life. Yes, these characters fit archetypal molds but they always break further and further out of those molds as an Arthur Marks film progresses.
The most intriguing part of A Woman For All Men is that the plot is that of a thriller but Marks’ screenwriting and direction is pure soap. It’s as if A Woman For All Men is a combination of Double Indemnity (1944) and Giant (1956). Every double cross and red herring in A Woman For All Men is followed by an intense focus on the emotional ramifications of that event on the lives of the characters. Marks has always exhibited a flair for melodrama in his B-pictures but A Woman For All Men is the closest Marks ever came to making a straight melodrama in the exploitation idiom.
This uniqueness is exactly why A Woman For All Men remains one of Arthur Marks’ most obscure and over looked films. Audiences don’t flock to see an exploitation film that’s this melodramatic. Fans of the exploitation genre prefer the gritty, violent worlds of Marks’ Bonnie’s Kids (1973), Detroit 9000 (1973) and J.D.’s Revenge (1976). As for me, I’m a sucker for Marks’ more melodramatic pictures. I really enjoyed A Woman For All Men but I can’t say that it eclipsed The Roommates (1973) as my favorite Arthur Marks picture.
