Dead Ringer

Later in his career, actor Paul Henreid directed a handful of sleazy, noir-adjacent films, most of them not very good; he had a strong showing, however, when he teamed up with his old co-star Bette Davis in Dead Ringer, a very-late-in-the-cycle, twin-swap noir with Gothic touches and a story premise nearly identical to Roberto Gavaldón’s La Otra (1945) two decades earlier. Davis and her wide eyes play the dual role of Margaret and Edith, the former having “stolen” and married the latter’s rich boyfriend, who has just died and left his fortune to the pampered Margaret. Since revenge is often the driving emotion in film noir, Edith plots to murder Margaret, take her place, and eliminate all traces of her former identity, even if this requires scalding her own hand with a hot poker to avoid signing documents legibly. Previn’s score blends in generous use of diegetic music, especially from the club downstairs leading up to the murder scene, and this was cinematographer Haller’s second time filming Bette Davis in double, perfecting his identical task from A Stolen Life (1946). (This was also Haller’s final film.) Special note: Dead Ringer features a death by dog mauling, a relative rarity in noir (1946’s The Chase has one too), in this case by a brilliantly photogenic Great Dane.