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Don Juan and Jack the Ripper figure in the erudite noir preamble, where Douglas Sirk evokes Baudelaire even before the culprit sends Scotland Yard letters laced with rephrased poetry ("A beauty that only death can enhance"). Predator and prey meet as a sign advertises "Murder in Soho," the foggy backdrop could be fin de siècle London but for the postwar brassiness of the Yank in the dance hall (Lucille Ball). She joins the investigation following a friend's disappearance, an undercover stroll through the lonely-hearts ads gives her a city of wolves and weasels. "What is it tonight, a sweepstakes for zombies?" The oneiric centerpiece has the amateur sleuth decked out in a Gainsborough gown for the cuckoo designer (Boris Karloff), who addresses the audience through a mirror and ushers in the spectacle in a fashion atelier filled with bulldogs, mannequins, and saber-rattling hysteria. (His opposite number is George Sander's talent manager and self-described "unmitigated cad," the same ravenous male gaze only wrapped in velvet.) From Siodmak (Pièges) a perilous vocation, modeling plus a certain "fear of meeting the wrong people," showgirl and maid and wife as guises for the inquisitive heroine. In addition to Karloff's scabrous feast of a cameo, the eccentric cast scintillates: Charles Coburn reveals a Porfiry side as the inspector, George Zucco is a guardian angel with muscles and crosswords, Joseph Calleia and Alan Mowbray run the sinister ring behind the sumptuous mansion, Cedric Hardwicke paints with baleful smarm and rather resembles the filmmaker. The music lover who ditches Schubert for a skirt, the dialogue with Hitchcock (Rebecca, Suspicion) for the trap of the romantic image, the Sirk wit in full sway. "The things I do for the force..." Karlson and Fuller in Scandal Sheet scrape away its veneers. With Alan Napier, Robert Coote, and Tanis Chandler. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |