Midnight Lace

Doris Day and film noir were never a natural fit, but producer Ross Hunter and director David Miller somehow make it work in the extremely glamorous Midnight Lace in which neither midnight nor lace is prominently featured. Sitting somewhere between the 1940’s Gothic noir melodramas and the Italian giallo horror phenomenon commencing in the 1960’s, the film depicts a newlywed heiress’s total alienation from her surroundings to the point of hysterical madness as a result of a stalker’s threats on her life. Married three months earlier to London business owner Tony Preston (Rex Harrison), Kit (Day) hears a strange voice calling out and threatening to kill her as she passes through the soupy fog of a quiet park (the serene, heavenly setting contrasts sharply with the menacing voice), followed days later by a threatening phone call, then another, then another. When the Scotland Yard investigation comes up short, Kit must face an increasingly skeptical husband, not to mention the doubts of her visiting aunt Bea (Myrna Loy) and handsome, young admirer Brian Younger (John Gavin just off his role in Psycho, 1960), who’s supervising the construction project next door which will serve as a dramatic backdrop for the climactic sequence. Essentially a whodunit with a dash of gaslighting thrown in for good measure, the film twists and turns through an array of red herrings, the viewer’s attention suspended just like Kit in the frozen elevator where she’s tormented by a strange figure (and in which her screams of terror sound uncomfortably sexual), unexpected red and blue lighting often giving her apartment an appearance of fantasy, not reality, which lends further disorientation. Roddy McDowell plays the creepy, predatory son of Kit’s maid who jumps to the head of the line of stalker suspects. Some consider Midnight Lace to be a cousin of another Hunter-produced 1960 film, Portrait in Black, a highly stylized suspense thriller in which Lana Turner appears in vivid color.