Kicks off like a James M. Cain story: a rugged mechanic in police custody narrating via flashback his red-hot affair with a rich man's wife. But the illicit twosome doesn't conspire to murder the husband, as you might expect genre to dictate; instead, the wife gets her divorce, and they marry. The second half of the movie becomes the story of what follows a red-hot affair when it cools down to room temperature. Turns out class barriers are a lot tougher to surmount when you're no longer rutting nonstop beneath a film of sweat. Full of resentment and alcohol, the lovers become two shitty people trying to salvage their shitty relationship. Very proto-Fassbinder! (Proto-"Uptown Girl," too.)

This was Edith Carlmar's first feature, and it suggests a wealth of visual imagination. She accomplishes a number of transitions through sly match cuts and montages. In one example, a clock ringed with glasses, its racing hour and minute hands both replaced by bottles, signifies a night of drunken excess; in another, the lovers' faces dissolve into an uncorked champagne bottle, its bubbles surging down its neck like semen. The sexual subtext in Death Is a Caress often flares up into the text. I don't know nearly enough about Norwegian film history, but postwar censorship must have been minimal, because no American film in 1949 could have explicitly mentioned abortion, let alone shown its adulterers canoodling half-nude, pre- and post-coitus. The scene in question, by the way, is highly arousing.