High Wall

Sharing a story premise with Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) and playing to Hollywood’s fashionable fascination with psychoanalysis and its pseudo-scientific implications during the 1940s, Curtis Bernhardt’s High Wall is a nocturnal, claustrophobic tale of murder, memory loss, and presumed guilt. Having attempted suicide after presumably murdering his wife, Steven Kenet (Robert Taylor) is admitted to a psychiatric hospital where Dr. Ann Lorrison (Audrey Totter) takes an interest in his case and is ultimately convinced that the amnesiac Kenet didn’t murder his wife at all. To save himself, Kenet’s obliged to agree to “narcosynthesis” for free association, break out of the hospital, and re-enact the night of his crime to land on the truth. Dorothy Patrick plays Kenet’s unfaithful wife Helen, and Herbert Marshall plays Willard Whitcombe, the publishing executive in whose apartment Helen died. (With Whitcombe, we get the only “murder by umbrella handle hook” in noir.) The Taylor-Totter chemistry could have been stronger, but High Wall is solid noir entertainment polished to comply with MGM’s high-gloss standards.