A rare Monogram film that received consistent acclaim from critics, William Castle’s When Strangers Marry is a compact, low-budget, romantic suspense noir released in 1944, the same year as the cycle’s first wave of master works (Double Indemnity, Laura, The Woman in the Window, etc.)  Following up her film debut in Mark Robson’s The Seventh Victim (1943), Kim Hunter stars as the naïve Mildred Baxter, who arrives in New York to meet her new husband Paul (Dean Jagger), a “salesman or something” whom she recently married after only knowing him for a matter of days. Paul is nowhere to be found at the hotel; instead, Mildred bumps into her old friend Fred Graham (Robert Mitchum), who encourages her to report Paul’s disappearance to the police, where they learn of a murder that just took place in the Philadelphia hotel where Paul had been staying. It’s impressive how much story Castle fits into just over an hour, the action twisting through a variety of Monogram studio sets of urban anonymity, including iconic noir shots like a high angle from just above a street lamp or a shadowy hotel room with a giant neon sign flashing just outside the window, the fugitive hiding out in a boarding house with a nosy little girl, a Share-a-Ride with a screaming baby, a joyful Harlem jazz club with grooving dancers and a grinning pianist. In fact, the film has a dreamy gauze about it, Mildred occasionally tormented by the shouting images of disembodied heads warning her about the “Murderer!” All the performers are excellent, especially the baby-faced Mitchum, who, it turns out, has the most challenging role (and gets to show off his buff upper body in a steam room scene), and even a young, unknown Rhonda Fleming who makes a brief appearance in the final scene.