John M. Stahl directs Gene Tierney, Cornel Wilde and Jeanne Crain in this film noir melodrama about a socialite with an obsessive love for her novelist husband.

Bright noir that looks like Sirk and proves gently psychologically unsettling. Tierney looks stunning no matter what states of unease (harried / paranoid / murderous / suicidal) she is in. I don’t want to spoil the strange little “happy” ending but I’ll posit two questions. Who doesn’t want to spend their marriage alone and uninterrupted with Gene Tierney? And should we really trust a narrator who is defence attorney for the survivors, retelling a story with many suspicious plot holes in it?

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Perfect Double Bill: Mildred Pierce (1945)