A Film Canon

 

 

This eccentric film marries an inversion of noir - a sleuthing secretary (Ella Raines), on the trail of a murderous private eye named Marlowe (Franchot Tome) - with a thriller, or even horror film, as evinced in the equal attention paid to shock and suspense, the increasing recourse to psychological (or at least criminological) discursion and, above all, the elaboration of a series of prototypical, if one-dimensional, serial killer traits, all of which centre on the unnerving self-awareness - or, rather, obsessive attempt to gain some fundamental lack of self-awareness - that has become characteristic of that figure, as he gazes at himself in the mirror, or fixates on his guilty hands. That said, this one- dimensionality, which is, to some extent, shared by most other members of the cast, is offset by Siodmak's poetic direction, which ensures that the more general premise - a wrongfully accused man's (Alan Curtis) desperate need to locate an anonymous woman - becomes the mere pretext for an elaboration of every part of Manhattan within which anonymity might dwell, as well as an identification of the city with the very prison from which the protagonist wishes to be released, paving the way for a conclusion centred on two houses in the heart of (a conspicuously rural) Long Island, and actually confirming his identification with the killer, insofar as the latter's motivations are only ever articulated in geographic terms: "I've never liked cities. Noise, confusion, dirt - and the people in them!" It's this final identification that provides the subversive subtext, ensuring that the twin gestures of resolution and separation - the killer's panoramic suicide jump from a city window, and the protagonist's re-integration back into the world of civil engineering - are given a common denominator in the latter's reduction to a disembodied, mechanical, urbanised voice, culminating a pervasive unease whose most explicit index has been Siodmak's identification of the camera's fluid distortions with a primal, erotic jazz session.