Stage Fright

The master of suspense was known for inserting lighthearted elements in his otherwise spine-tingling films, which some would say compromised the master’s true noir credentials. While Stage Fright is no exception, its handful of romantic and farcical scenes defer to the tension of a mysterious murder and a psychotic break. Jane Wyman stars as Eve Gill, an actress at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts secretly in love with her longtime friend Jonathan Cooper (Richard Todd), who has been carrying on an illicit affair with married stage diva Charlotte Inwood (Marlene Dietrich). When Charlotte murders her husband during a fit of anger, Cooper finds himself a primary suspect, and Charlotte makes no effort to exonerate him. Agreeing to hide Cooper at her father’s house in the country, Eve teams up with her dad (Alastair Slim) to embark on an investigation to clear Cooper’s name, including a plot to go undercover as a replacement live-in maid working for Charlotte. Culminating in a confession secretly recorded over a loudspeaker (a device to be used again in Orson Welles’ 1958 Touch of Evil), the film is a variation on a somewhat common noir theme in which a kindhearted, lovesick woman helps to save the man she’s crushing on, the prime example perhaps Robert Siodmak’s Phantom Lady (1944). As expected from Hitchcock, the film is beautifully crafted, one highlight being the final confrontation in a dormant horse carriage in the theater’s props basement.