The Unseen

On the surface, film noir and children wouldn’t seem to go together very well, and it’s true that kids tend not to play a prominent role in the cycle. A decent-sized helping of extraordinary noirs, however, center entirely around children, including The Fallen Idol (1948), The Window (1949), If I Should Die Before I Wake (1952), The Night of the Hunter (1955), and many others. While the two kids in Lewis Allen’s The Unseen aren’t at center stage, they feature prominently in the story of a new governess dealing with mysterious murders connected to the empty house next door, which is called Commodore’s Folly. The doe-eyed Gail Russell stars as Elizabeth Howard, whose arrival at the Crescent Street mansion of widower David Fielding (Joel McCrea) to care for his son Barnaby (Richard Lyon) and daughter Ellen (Nona Griffith) coincides the the murder of an old woman just a block away. Elizabeth soon learns that young Barnaby is in daily contact with the suspicious former governess, Maxine (Phyllis Brooks), who has him unlocking the door every night for mysterious reasons. When another gruesome murder takes place, the entire Fielding household is implicated in the crimes. The always excellent Isobel Elsom plays Marian Tygarth, the owner of Commodore’s Folly, and Herbert Marshall plays friend and neighbor Charles Evans. Despite a script credited to Raymond Chandler, the story borders on incoherent, so viewers are advised to focus their attention more on the stunning cinematography and brilliantly evoked Gothic atmosphere, not to mention Russell’s ethereal beauty which appears to glow in the copious shadows.