Lady In Cement (1968)

Originally Written
Saturday, June 2, 2007

Lady In Cement is an ironic title for a film that actually seems to be stuck in cement and going absolutely nowhere. With a run-time of only 93 minutes this film runs so slow it makes Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End seem like a thirty minute sitcom. This is the first Frank Sinatra film I have watched through in its entirety so I hope this film is a poor example of his movie career, if not, then his film career is highly overrated.

Sinatra plays Tony Rome, a private investigator who discovers the body of the blonde bombshell at the bottom of the ocean, her feet in cement blocks. After calling the Coast Guard he washes his hands of the matter and moves on, but it isn't long until he receives a new job that might happen to relate to the body he discovered. A beastly man named Waldo Gronsky hires him to search for his missing girlfriend, is it a coincidence that she’s also a beautiful blonde and went missing around the time the girl in the ocean was probably killed? Rome starts his investigation and turns up quite a few suspects who may have had a motive, but they soon begin to drop like flies. The situation grows even worse when he ends up being framed for one of the murders, now he has to quickly solve this case before he ends up behind bars.

I knew going into this it would probably be corny, but I didn't think it was going to be this bad. The film's soundtrack can only be compared to an extremely campy comedy film, which doesn't suit a film that's supposed to be a "crime thriller". The acting is so horrible it goes from rather amusing to painful to watch in a matter of minutes, most of it is due to the horrible script, the lines are so awful that it's hard to believe someone was paid to write them. Believe it or not but Raquel Welch gives the best performance in the entire film, which is unfortunate seeing that she's only in it for ten minutes.

Overall Lady In Cement isn't worth the time, and certainly isn't even worth watching for the ten minutes Raquel graces the screen. Frank Sinatra can't act his way out of a paper bag in this horrid excuse for a thriller, and it's now clear to me why I have never heard of this film before. As it turns out this is a sequel to a film entitled Tony Rome, watching the trailer for that I discovered it had more action just in the trailer than this entire film. In the end, pass this one by and only watch Tony Rome at your own risk, I'd hope it would be better than this mess but I doubt I'll ever find out.

4/10