German
Expressionism, that artistic wave which swept through all of German theater,
film and art in general from the early 1900s, can be found in the bloodstream
of Film-Noir which rose in popularity as a subgenre of crime thrillers. Like the Expressionist movement, Film-Noir
often focused on bleaker themes filmed in low-key black-and-white emphasizing shadowy
figures lurking in the dark amid smoke or fog.
Usually the film takes place within the city and involves a convoluted
plotline with characters in peril and/or double-crossing in a game of theft or
murder.
Much
of it emerged at the height of the Great Depression, around the time much of
the German film industry began emigrating to the United States in the wake of
the Nazi takeover of the country. It
should come as no surprise one of Hollywood’s top purveyors of the Film-Noir
subgenre, Robert Siodmak, was one of those German auteurs who fled Hitler’s
regime on two different occasions and applied his Expressionist techniques to
one of the greatest contributions to the subgenre with his 1944 whodunit noir
thriller Phantom Lady.
Based
on the 1942 novel by Cornell Woolrich and adapted by Caged screenwriter Bernard C. Schoenfield, Phantom Lady tells the story of devoted office secretary Carol “Kansas”
Richman (Ella Raines) who finds herself on a desperate mission to clear the
name of her wrongfully convicted boss, Scott Henderson (Alan Curtis). Charged with murdering his wife after one of
neckties is found at the crime scene, Kansas enlists the help of her boss’ best
friend Jack Marlow (Franchot Tone) who may know more about the death of his
friend’s wife than he leads on.
Remembered
largely as Siodmak’s first Hollywood noir and the first film produced by Joan
Harrison, Alfred Hitchcock’s former secretary and script assistant before she
became one of Universal Pictures’ earliest female executives. Boasting slick, moody cinematography by Woody
Bredell and running at a brisk eighty-seven minutes, Phantom Lady bears all the trademarks people have come to expect
from Film-Noir from shadowy chase sequences, long corridors with mercurial
figures lurking in the distance, the echoes of footsteps in concrete
alleyways. All in all, it’s a heavy,
choking atmosphere of the night life interspersed with shadowy nightclubs where
danger seems just around the corner.
Performances
from the three leads are strong with Mutiny
on the Bounty star Franchot Tone, looking very like Joe Turkel’s doppelganger,
providing a. Ella Raines as Kansas makes
for a plucky heroine unafraid to place herself in harm’s way to save her
employer’s life before running the full gamut of intimidating to enticing and
back again.
Take for instance a prolonged
sequence where she stares down and follows the bartender who served her boss
the night of the murder, with her heavy undaunted brow with eyes glowering up
from underneath. You feel the menace coming
off of her face in those scenes and for a moment aren’t sure if she’s
transforming into a femme fatale. Later
still when she dresses provocatively and stares down drummer Cliff (William Castle
regular Elisha Cook, Jr.) with bedroom eyes, their nonverbal exchange is
drenched in sexual tension entirely of her creating before she makes her move
and inadvertently reveals her real motives.
While
the film didn’t fare as favorably with critics at the time (see notoriously cantankerous
critic Bosley Crowther’s review), it did however strike a chord with audiences
and cemented director Siodmak’s reputation in Hollywood as a solid genre
director. In the years since its initial
release Phantom Lady is regarded as
one of the quintessential Film-Noir pictures of the 1940s and a stepping stone
for director Siodmak. Though the film is
less convoluted than, say, Out of the
Past, and isn’t nearly as action packed as Gun Crazy, Phantom Lady is
a solid genre film notable for not revealing the central characters until later
in the picture and keeping the audience guessing as to where the loyalties of
our heroes lie.
Score:
- Andrew Kotwicki