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Doze off in bed and wake up aboard a hurtling train with a gun in your purse, that's the married state. From a layout of The Lady Vanishes it moves to a riff on Suspicion, the blissful lovebirds from Midnight are now a sleepwalking socialite (Claudette Colbert) and a treacherous architect (Don Ameche) in the age of psychoanalysis. (Another screwball speck amid these noir shadows: Colbert's tipsy pirouette at a traditional Chinese wedding.) Sending her to the edge of a balcony or leaving her alone with a hulking analyst in the dark living room ("Do you know why you're frightened," he asks with fireplace poker in hand), the wife's terrors multiply. "A certain tension" is the prognosis, a "daffy" mind is the police's impression, the truth is a blueprint of infidelity and manipulation shot by Douglas Sirk with tons of baleful wit. The bespectacled boogeyman (George Coulouris) is really a querulous photographer, his shabby studio is where the philandering husband he's in cahoots with keeps the smoky vamp (Hazel Brooks) on a literal pedestal. Sirk's symbols are svelte and acrid: A cup of drugged chocolate for the heroine (Rosemary's Baby), a swiveling POV on the gothic staircase, neon arrows and champagne at a seedy roadhouse (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?). The jungle inside the mansion, the realities people construct in order to wreck each other, the bleary condition of domestic stability. "Your girl is a lot of girls. This is one of them." Robert Cummings as the pushy suitor clinches the Hitchcockian line of thought, the climax is a necessary rupture, la sonnambula awake at last. With Rita Johnson, Keye Luke, Queenie Smith, Raymond Burr, and Ralph Morgan. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |