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By shooting Black Widow in DeLuxe Color and CinemaScope, Nunnally Johnson might have been trying to avoid classification with those low-rent B&W crime films of the period that we’ve come to call noir, but it didn’t necessarily work. To be sure, much of the intimacy and inventiveness of noir is lacking on such a panoramic screen full of sometimes garish colors, but the duplicity of the characters and seediness of the story make up for it. The narrative sees theatrical producer Peter Denver (Van Heflin) befriending a young female writer (Peggy Ann Garner) who brings him nothing but trouble, including getting Denver framed for murder. Gene Tierney plays Denver’s wife Iris whose trust in him begins to crack, and Ginger Rogers goes slightly over-the-top as stage diva Carlotta Marin who encourages Iris’s suspicions. Early noir stalwart George Raft is on hand as the grizzled police lieutenant C.A. Bruce. Black Widow is a satisfying if not masterful whodunit that recollects an era of New York City when Broadway was still glamorous and Greenwich Village was “the cheap place to live.”
