I watched Phantom Lady
tonight, marvelling yet again at the way Robert Siodmak and
cinematographer Woody Bredell create a series of weird shadow-worlds,
as if Manhattan were a kind of fun-house, and we're looking at it in
a distorting mirror, except when we see beautifully clearly, and it becomes threatening, scary. They would work their magic again two years
later on The Killers, where the noir world is starker and harsher,
more fixed into what we now imagine it to be. There's a fascinating
comparison to be made here too: the fatalism of Swede at the start of
The Killers and in the Hemingway story is matched by the fatalism
of Scott Henderson, once he's convicted of his wife's murder. He
tells his loyal secretary that he can finally sleep, now that he
knows his future. This is perfect noir fatalism, helped by the fact
that Curtis is perfect as a noir hero, nowhere near as smart as he
thinks he is, including not being able to see the perfect woman right
before his eyes. In the novel by Cornell Woolrich, you come to
believe that Scott may be deluded, and the woman may not exist. In
The Killers, Burt Lancaster as Swede is a different sort of
fatalist—he's smart enough to know he made a mistake with a woman,
and he knows he has to pay for it. There's no question of delusion,
just of fatalistic judgement.
The story of Phantom
Lady, in case you don't recall or haven't seen it (and there will be
spoilers of a sort later) is that Henderson and his wife argued, he
went to bar, met an unhappy woman in a funny hat, spent the evening
with her, and came home to find the cops all over his flat and his
wife murdered. He needs to establish his alibi, but the woman can't
be found, and the witnesses deny she was ever with him. So his secretary Carol (or
'Kansas', as Scott calls her, because she's from Topeka) goes on the
search.
Between Scott's gloomy
night on the town and Carol's search, we are presented with a cross
between an odyssey and sideshow (when you think about it, isn't the
original odyssey a bit of freak show too?). The city takes on the character of a nightmare world, and the population turns out to be seriously unbalanced. Carol stalks the
bartender who served Scott and the woman, shot brilliantly at the end
of the bar, staring at him. In cheap disguise, she becomes a 'hep kitten' and hooks up with the drummer (Elisha Cook, Jr.) who gave the
woman the eye when she and Scott went to a show—Cook takes her to
an after-hours jam session playing Gene Krupa hophead drums
completely out of time, occasionally out of all semblance of dubbing
the Krupa solo. Ella Raines is superb as Carol—not just in her
disguise but in the way she hides her feelings from her boss, and the
way, the first time she actually calls him 'Scott' it simply zips
past him but satisfies her.
Thomas Gomez, always so
threatening in noir, is good as the cop who tries to help her but the
top-billing in the film went to Franchot Tone as Scott's best friend,
who of course is the killer, though they try to make his entrance
into a shock. The mere fact he's top-billed in such a relatively
small is all the clue you need. Tone is well cast as a psychopath,
because he looks more like Jiminy Cricket than a leading men, and he
does overplay the twitches of his killer; it reminded me of a bigger
version of Tim Robbins doing a retard in Mystic River. There's a
sense, though, that Tone would have made a brilliant Cornell
Woolrich, had anyone ever done a movie about him—and you could use
those sleazy sets from Phantom Lady to shoot it: maybe this was
Woolrich exploring the neighbourhood of his own imagination.
Watching the film
though, I wondered for the first time why Raines needed to find the
woman in the hat at all. In the trial montage scenes, the prosecution
fixes the time of the killing at 8pm, and we know from the bartender
he was in the bar at 8:05. He doesn't need the woman for an alibi. By
the same template, his friend's alibi, that he was on boat sailing
for Brazil at 8:30 should not have eliminated him either. I'm sure
there's a reason why it doesn't that is just as convincing as Cook's
drumming, or Tone's twitching. It doesn't matter—Phantom Lady is a
film you can get lost in, at your own peril.
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