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Between Hitchcock's Blackmail and Lang's The Blue Gardenia, a watershed of film noir expressionism in the midst of a New York summer. A Magritte image kicks things off, the titular dame (Fay Helm) with her back to the camera, succumbing to a bit of anonymous companionship on a Saturday night with the jilted engineer (Alan Curtis). The fellow's darkened apartment lights up to reveal the scene of a crime, his only alibi in the case of the strangled wife is the date he can't quite remember, "a complete blank." He slumps on Death Row, his secretary (Ella Raines) tracks down shady witnesses. To the anxious bartender (Andrew Tombes), she's a glowering conscience at the end of the diagonal counter. To the inflamed drummer (Elisha Cook Jr.), she's a black-satin minx in the hot-rhythm dungeon. "You like jazz?" Robert Siodmak throws the mystery away fairly early, the better to concentrate on coups of light and darkness. Thus the psychotic sculptor (Franchot Tone) enters as a baleful semi-silhouette with a monologue about the "inconceivable good and terrible evil" of hands, an übermensch in his own mind. ("Madness" is how his urge is described, he prefers "genius.") Stalking on the elevated train platform gives a dash of Val Lewton, the elusive memory is eventually found in the padded cell of a Manhattan penthouse. "You're all too normal," says the police inspector (Thomas Gomez) in the deserted music hall while the culprit quivers before a dressing-room mirror. Siodmak orchestrates shifting identities in urban shadows, and builds to the frisson of the heroine's gradual realization that she's in a locked studio with the murderer. "Yes, everything goes together. It's an art." Truffaut pays unexpected tribute in Confidentially Yours. Cinematography by Elwood Bredell. With Aurora Miranda, Regis Toomey, Joseph Crehan, Doris Lloyd, and Virginia Brissac. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |