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The tabloid headline ("Letter from an Unknown Murderess") is just the private joke to be exchanged between émigré auteurs in Hollywood. The artist is a portrait-sketcher and corpulent wolf (Raymond Burr), his double is the slick columnist (Richard Conte) who wields the bachelor's little black book like an amulet. Between them is the suburban pavilion of women housing a sensualist (Ann Sothern) who's settled for dates with her ex-husband, a pulp buff (Jeff Donnell) lost in her own world of "passion and violence," and, as befits the fable of connections lost and found, a switchboard operator (Anne Baxter). Dumped by her G.I. beau, Baxter impulsively accepts the smoothie's dinner invitation and wakes up the following day to a homicide story and no memory. "That always makes a man so romantic," sighs the roommate at the grisly news, absent-mindedly fondling a carving knife. Fritz Lang on a shoestring, photographing Los Angeles lives with Buñuelian speed and strangeness: The girlie canvases in the lothario's studio accrue shadows as his sinister side emerges mid-date, the South Seas-themed restaurant is an indoors jungle complete with a flower-peddling blind crone and Nat "King" Cole himself at the piano crooning the title number. ("Pretty song. Too bad it was a background for murder.") The Woman in the Window, certainly, but also Hitchcock's atelier in Blackmail, Spillane and McCarthy, Sylvia Plath's Mirror crack'd. The tell-tale fireplace poker, the search for the culprit's shoe size to point up the Cinderella association, plenty of rum for "the mermaid's downfall." Lang pulls it all together into an astringent celebration of the heroine's passion and vulnerability, bouncing off the predatory Fifties grid like Liebestod emanating from a drab airport waiting-room. Cinematography by Nicholas Musuraca. With George Reeves, Richard Erdman, Ruth Storey, and Ray Walker. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |