Sleep, My Love

Combining key plot elements of Gaslight (1944) and Whirlpool (1949), Douglas Sirk’s Sleep, My Love is a finely-crafted and entertaining addition to the “woman in peril” category even if its premise has been executed more successfully elsewhere in the noir cycle. Waking up on a train to Boston with no memory of how she got there, wealthy Alison Courtland (Claudette Colbert) is soon informed by psychiatrist Dr. Ralph Reinhart (Frank Morgan) and her husband Richard (Don Ameche), whom she recently shot while sleepwalking, that they are concerned about her mental health. As her troubling episodes of memory loss continue, she makes the acquaintance of handsome Bruce Elcott (Robert Cummings), who becomes suspicious of Richard and protective of Alison, leading him to investigate the malevolent forces at work. (The modern, “platonic” friendship that develops between Bruce and Alison is beautifully and realistically rendered.) Gorgeous Hazel Brooks plays femme fatale Daphne, a wholly rude, selfish moneygrubber who struts around in black like a sultry witch. Sirk makes excellent use of the Sutton Place mansion set and its four floors of treacherous staircases, perhaps the film’s most memorable image Alison’s ghost-like, nightgown-donned presence on the balcony railing awaiting gravity’s pull.