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The same gloves that rifle through the printed opening credits are swiftly at work on a doomed secretary, who's last seen dangling from the chandelier as an upside-down reflection reveals the culprit (cp. Losey's Time Without Pity). "Criminals don't run true to type, you know that," thus the "teller of strange tales" (Claude Rains) in the studio spreading silken malevolence over the airwaves. (A dash of UFA bravura traces its trajectory: The camera tracks toward an amplifier speaker until the screen turns black, out of the darkness roars a charging locomotive.) The noir tangle has begun even before the start of the film with a shipwrecked heiress (Joan Caulfield), the return from the grave is a flight from Rio to a husband she cannot quite remember (Ted North). Baleful mechanisms, "a throbbing in the air," the wicked niece (Audrey Totter) hears the murder over the phone while the radio star keeps a library of macabre recordings. Amid the feints and shadows, the producer (Constance Bennett) purrs to a psychoanalyst as if to a reviewer: "Just don't open all our secret doors." Between Mildred Pierce and Life with Father, the full bizarrerie of Michael Curtiz's American families. Investigations within investigations, the uncle in the soundproof study and the widower in the bonfire. Laura for the heroine's portrait, of course, and there's Hurd Hatfield himself to joke about its changing expression. ("Kill" flashing in neon outside a mug's motel room and a high angle descending on drugged champagne also figure in the expressionistic gags.) "I think you'd better excuse me, I detest scenes not of my own making." The climactic spectacle of Rains' dulcet tones cracking before the microphone is elucidated a decade later as Lang's bitter distillate in Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. Cinematography by Woody Bredell. With Fred Clark, Harry Lewis, and Jack Lambert. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |