Whirlpool

When kleptomaniac housewife Ann Sutton (Gene Tierney) steals a pin from a department store at the beginning of Otto Preminger’s Whirlpool, she couldn’t have anticipated the incident would ultimately get her charged with both adultery and murder. Initially, the mysterious hypnotist David Korvo (Jose Ferrer) persuades the store to let her go, but this begins a weeks-long relationship in which Ann meets him for daily hypnosis treatments, unaware that he plans to involve her in his own criminal intentions. Ann’s shame is further complicated by her perceived need to serve as a happy, dutiful wife to her famed psychiatrist husband William (Richard Conte), perhaps a postwar warning to the forthcoming 1950’s happy homemakers (William advises her to “just stay healthy and adorable”). Compared with Preminger’s superior earlier noirs, Whirlpool is a bit talky and stagey, closer in style to his later Anatomy of a Murder (1959); a few scenes, however, bring out the director’s visual panache, like when Ann trespasses at night in a trance, and David Raksin’s outstanding score features a consistent refrain of anticipation.