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Homicide in fin de siècle London, a Robert Siodmak formulation. "I'd like to know what's going on inside your head." "It's much better than you shouldn't, dear. Might frighten you." One year ahead of Scarlet Street, the gentlemanly tobacconist "of a few peculiarities" (Charles Laughton) who has enough of the domineering shrew (Rosalind Ivan) and honors his "till death do us part" vows with an impromptu Christmas Eve bludgeoning. Thus freed, he weds the young stenographer he's been chastely courting (Ella Raines) only to realize that, just as he killed to finish a relationship, he will have to kill again to save another. Next door there's the union of the abusive misanthrope (Henry Daniell) and the battered wallflower (Molly Lamont), reminiscent of the marital shackles of The 39 Steps. Surveying all of them is the shrewd Scotland Yard inspector (Stanley Ridges), who fondles the protagonist's guilt with a methodical demonstration of the art of mise en scène: As he re-enacts the harridan's death in long takes, the detective virtually takes over Siodmak's position as imagemaker, dimming the lights, guiding the camera's gaze up and down the staircase, and throwing noir shadows onto the cozy period textures. "Here's to love grown cold," toasts the blackmailing neighbor, moments later Laughton is whipping up a cocktail of whiskey and anodyne. (The poisoned-corpse-behind-the-couch sequence that follows, with a suddenly crowded drawing-room and a curious kitten pawing at a discarded chain, is a deft bit of escalating tension that Hitchcock would expand into Rope.) A biting tale of three marriages, two wretched ones saved by murder and a joyous third brought down by that pesky hobgoblin, "sense of decency." With Dean Harens, Raymond Severn, and Eve Amber. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |