This movie might have the most misleading title of all-time. Is it an action movie? Or a war movie? Or maybe a noir?
Nope. Hell is Sold Out is a romantic comedy-drama sorta thing. I’m talkin’ a body count of el zilcho zero nada. Nobody even TRIES to kill anybody. Going by this movie, Hell isn’t even close to being sold out.
Once you get past that, this is an okay love triangle flick with maybe its biggest flaw being that it tries to sell stuffy old Herbert Lom to us as a romantic lead. It’s not that he’s a bad actor. It’s just that Lom instantly feels like a villain every time he’s onscreen. He’s about as warm as a popsicle. That’s just how he is.
Meanwhile, the story is actually intriguing.
A French writer of popular pulp novels (Lom) during World War II enlists to help crush the Krauts and he ends up captured by the Nazis and wrongly presumed dead by his own military.
While he’s gone, fledgling (and fetching) lady writer Mai Zetterling cons her way into being considered his wife, despite never having even met him, and publishes her own ultra-commercial potboiler (titled Hell is Sold Out) under his name. It’s the best way she can figure out to get her writing out there. Right away, the book becomes a sensation, the most popular book that Lom has ever “written”.
After the war, when Lom returns to his opulent home, unexpected by everyone and with several questions about this book that he never wrote but that’s wildly popular all over the streets with his name on it, we feel set up for some serious intrigue, BUT…
No.
Instead, this is all a screwball set-up for Lom and Zetterling to fall in love for no other reason than that’s what’s supposed to happen here, I guess. Snooze, belch, fart. Even their characters don’t seem into it.
The only interesting thing about this movie is its cynical view of the publishing business. When Lom’s editor becomes aware of the charade, she sees no problem with keeping the whole matter hush-hush. She even becomes brazen about telling Lom that he was always a hack writer anyway. An artist’s name is nothing but a commodity in this world; it doesn’t matter what’s behind it. Fame is a con job. As long as the money’s rolling in, everyone can be trusted to keep their secrets so that it doesn’t stop.
This film doesn’t have the guts to run with that to the end, but there are moments here where it works, all of which are inevitably spoiled by lazy lapses into saccharin.