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José Ferrer's resemblance to a young Freud gives a hint to what Otto Preminger is up to in this very wry, very Viennese reconsideration of the Mabuse mythos. The bourgeois kleptomaniac (Gene Tierney) is caught with a filched brooch but rescued from scandal by Ferrer's urbane astrologist turned hypnotist, Doctor Korvo. Her anxieties threaten to spill over yet are tucked away to please her psychiatrist husband (Richard Conte), just the prey for the uptown quack with a keen interest in relationships ("A successful marriage is usually based on what a husband and wife don't know about each other") and infidelity ("Even our government is against monopoly"). He gives himself a surgical alibi and makes his move, manipulating the socialite is another experiment in "fears and secrets and guilts." Suppressed tensions and memories are the tools of the interloper's trade, and of the director's, too—the mesmerized heroine wandering into the scene of a crime (painting, fireplace, strangled body) is a hazy remembrance of Laura, the high-angled, curving crane turns the victim's living room into a mental state. Less a matter of innocence than of identity as Tierney's doll-like mask of "healthy and adorable" docility cracks in a remarkable long-take at the prison's visiting room, the police lieutenant (Charles Bickford) ponders the revelation while pride drives the husband away. Self-discovery as therapy, cinema as trance, one of Ben Hecht's sharpest screen jobs, Preminger has them all at his fingertips. (The conscious can be a bustling department store or a bedside framed photograph, finally it is a record shattered by a bullet.) Critical inanities (Crowther: "A flapdoodle," Kael: "A real stinker") were countered by artistic responses (Rossellini's La Paura, Hitchcock's Marnie). With Barbara O'Neill, Constance Collier, Eduard Franz, and Fortunio Bonanova. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |