The first really good film from director Joseph H. Lewis. He’s gone up in the world from his early days working the Poverty Row studios. Here, Lewis turns out a nice nail-biter for the Columbia Pictures B-wing. The budget is a bit bigger, though still small, and the script is a mean little humdinger with some real hateful bad guys. Meanwhile, Lewis’s direction is full of the clean, efficient lines of a director who’s well-schooled in how to get things done under strict limitations.
It’s the story an American woman named Julia Ross (Nina Foch) in London who’s kidnapped by an unlikely group of crooks: a wealthy old matriarch (May Whitty, who played nothing but grande dame types like this in the movies), her shady son (the instantly menacing George McCready) and an equally shady hanger-on (witchy Anita Bolster).
Their scheme is elaborate and ridiculous, but it works because this film has one foot firmly planted in noir–lots of rain, shadows and secrets–and noir is allowed to be ridiculous.
Once our crooks have found their perfect victim (a woman with no family or husband or boyfriend), they knock her out on sleepy drugs, take her to their big house by the sea, confine her to a bedroom, and pretend that she’s a completely different person. She’s George McCready’s crazy wife, their madwoman in the attic, a lady best kept away from the steak knives, whom they keep locked away for her own safety.
However, she’s not exactly a “gaslight” case. She’s still got her wits about her. Julia Ross knows EXACTLY who she is and that this is all a fraud. However, our kidnappers have this all set up so well that when she begs outsiders to help her, it only makes her look MORE CRAZY.
It’s no office party.
The run time is a mere sixty-five minutes, not one of which is wasted. Lewis sharpens each scene to a razor’s edge. Master shots rule here. They drink in the scenery, but they’re also claustrophobic. This big manor home is a prison and eventually a death trap. Lots of information often hits us in one shot and a few economical lines of dialogue. When Lewis goes in for a rare close-up, he makes it count.