Cause for Alarm!

Tay Garnett’s Cause for Alarm! is a perfect example of domestic noir. Loretta Young stars as Ellen Jones, a typical suburban housewife doing typical suburban housewife things, striving to look presentable while she chats with the neighborhood children, greets visiting relatives, and bakes cookies, all while doting on her sick husband George (Barry Sullivan) who’s bedridden upstairs. The suspicious underbelly of such tranquility comes in the form of her husband’s seething paranoia: he’s so convinced that Ellen and his friend — and physician — Ranny Grahame (Bruce Cowling) are plotting his murder that he writes a letter to the district attorney outlining all the hypothetical details for evidence in the event of his death. Without divulging the recipient or purpose of the letter, George asks Ellen to hand it to the postman (Irving Bacon) on his shift, which she does, but, after a violent confrontation with George, she spends the rest of the film attempting frantically to retrieve it (“the most terrifying day of my life”). Despite a fairly simple setup, Garnett builds continuous tension as Ellen scrambles to retrieve the letter in town while nosy neighbors and visitors come dangerously close to finding out the truth; even the U.S. Postal Service is presented as a source of menace and frustration. It’s not a big film, but Young’s performance gives it a big impact.