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Man, this is a hard DVD to come by. I could only find it on Region 2, a Spanish import, and it was expensive.
Was it worth it? Well, yes. Not so much because it's a masterpiece of film making, though directed by Curt Siodmak (the credits on IMDb.com read "Robert" but the DVD credits list Curt), or because it has a couple of familiar figures from other murder mysteries -- Elisha Cook, Jr., and Thomas Gomez -- but because my decade-long curiosity about the movie has finally been satisfied.
Essentially, a respected but self-contained engineer (Alan Curtis) has been stood up by his estranged wife and finds himself in a New York bar with two show tickets in his pocket. A woman with a strange hat is on the stool next to his and he politely invites her to join him at the musical review. She accepts, a little gloomily. The mopey bartender gives them both the eye as they leave.
At the show, the tempestuous star notices that this lady in the audience is wearing the same hat and erupts offstage with anger. The drummer in the band, Cook, leers at the silent lady but gets no response. Curtis takes the woman to her home and asks her name but she won't give it, and she doesn't want to know his. If she'd been a Longfellow devotee she'd have said something about ships that pass in the night.
Okay, Curtis goes home to find his wife has been murdered in his absence. The head police officer, Gomez, turns him over to the DA. His only alibi is that he was with a phantom lady whom no one else seems to remember -- not the bartender, not the Latina star, not the cab driver ("Al Alp"), not the drummer -- and since the lady herself has disappeared, it's impossible to dig her up.
Curtis is convicted and sentenced to die. But Inspector Gomez has thought things over and decided her's probably innocent because nobody with a brain would make up such a stupid story. He joins Curtis's loving secretary, Ella Raines, in re-investigating the case informally.
They visit the supposed witnesses again. The ominous bartender is run over by a car, perhaps accidentally, so he's out of the picture. The hot-tempered Latina has left because the show closed and she's uncooperative and ignorant of the source of the hat anyway. Elisha Cook, Jr., is strangled by the real murderer but not before he is featured in a scene in which he pounds the drums in an improvised jazz group. His sweaty face assumes an expression which doesn't suggest intense focus but rather a monstrous, orgasmic insanity. His eyeballs roll to the ceiling, his mouth gapes, his hammering becomes frenzied. I laughed out loud.
Nobody's performance is otherwise outstanding, but all are professional enough. Thomas Gomez is always reliable. Best performance, though, is probably by Franchot Tone. He's the real murderer and he fakes his alibi. He's reserved and artistic. Even when he faints he's decorous. I don't know how to put this precisely but Tone seems to be thinking as well as simply acting his part. Alan Curtis as the innocent engineer is near zero on the Kelvin scale and belongs in a B picture.
I don't know why it's considered as classic. It's really your basic murder mystery by Cornell Woolrich, not as good as some of his others. But Siodmak's direction is sensitive. A man gets run over and his hat winds up in a gutter with water running around it. His use of shadows is quietly effective.
Glad I got it.


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