Phantom Lady

The acting and writing are perfectly serviceable, but the primary appeal of Robert Siodmak’s Phantom Lady is its breathtaking visual direction. Perhaps the most consistently expressionist of all the early noirs, the film was the most significant milestone in Siodmak’s career: it both culminated the cinematographic skills he had developed in his early days in Germany and launched his spectacular, stylistically consistent, and unmatched seven-year run of noirs which established him as an American auteur. When her handsome boss Scott Henderson (Alan Curtis) with whom she’s secretly in love is convicted of killing his wife after an argument, Carol Richman (Ella Raines) makes it her mission to prove his innocence before he’s sent to the electric chair. With the aid of equally skeptical Inspector Burgess (Thomas Gomez), Carol re-traces Henderson’s steps on the night of the murder, which involves finding the woman he picked up at a bar to replace his wife as his theater companion but whom nobody recalls seeing with him. Elisha Cook, Jr. has a juicy part as jazz drummer Cliff who falls for Carol’s charms and discloses his involvement in the crime and its cover-up, while Franchot Tone plays Jack Marlow, an old friend of Henderson who returns home to help Carol investigate but may have his own agenda. Featuring a mind-blowing, dream-like, underground jazz jam session and a lusciously shot cat and mouse sequence throughout the city sidewalks and subway stations at night, Phantom Lady creates visual poetry out of studio sets and boasts some of the most imaginative shadows of the cycle.