Franchot Tone: From Pre-Code Romance to Noir

On June 13, 1934 (80 years ago), an amendment to the Motion Picture Production Code was adopted which established the Production Code Administration (PCA) and required all films released after July 1, 1934, to obtain a certificate of approval. The PCA had two offices —one in Hollywood and the other in New York City. The first film to receive an MPPDA seal of approval (endorsed by studio executives) was The World Moves On (1934), an historic drama directed by John Ford, starring Madeleine Carroll and Franchot Tone.

Franchot Tone (1905–1968) is particularly significative as an actor who would make a very interesting progression from his early roles as a debonair playboy during his stay at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios to obscure and impenetrable characters on the wrong side of the tracks. His tristfully mischievous smile and penetrating dark eyes would serve him to accentuate this metamorphosis. Although Tone’s first big screen appearance was for Paramount Pictures in The Wiser Sex (1932) opposite Claudette Colbert, MGM saw potential in his refined image and offered him a long term contract. Tone’s privileged upbringing and high-profile education -Rennes University in France, President of the Dramatic Club at Cornell University (graduated with Phi Beta Kappa honors)- had led him to play the aristocratic variations he was routinely assigned in the popular romantic dramas and comedies of the 1930s.

In seven of those films, he’d costar with MGM’s Queen Joan Crawford (his first wife); he also did four movies with the Platinum Blonde Jean Harlow. Louis B. Mayer didn’t think Franchot had enough “star appeal” to be a leading man so frequently he accepted supporting roles in the part of the leading lady’s wealthiest suitor.

After playing in 29 motion pictures in six years, Franchot left MGM after completing Busby Berkeley's Fast and Furious (1939), a light detective story (starring Ann Sothern) which would anticipate his next cynical investigators on-screen such as Stuart Bailey in I Love Trouble (1948) and Howard Malloy in Jigsaw (1949). “Even angels can get their wings clipped!”, says District Attorney Howard Malloy to party girl Barbara Whitfield (Jean Wallace, Tone’s second wife in real life). Wallace’s Barbara retorts: “You got the scissors?” Tangential to his conflicted sleuth characters, he would display dangerous psychopathic tendencies in Phantom Lady (1944), and The Man on the Eiffel Tower (produced by Franchot’s company A&T Film in 1949). This astonishing transition into the noir ‘underworld’ could seem almost inexplicable, but in the case of Tone is singularly valid due to the connection between two genres that have usually been marginalized and even persecuted by the official censorship systems: Pre-Code and Noir.

“I’m the intellectual type. Sometimes, my baser nature gets the better of me,” Tone’s character Tom confesses to Loretta Young’s Mary in Midnight Mary (1933). “Your hair is like a field of silver daisies. I’d like to run barefoot through your hair” (Tone wooing Harlow in Bombshell, 1933), “You did a pretty good job of outgrowing a lot of things,” or “You jump at the same cheap conclusions that all cheap people do,” to Joan Crawford in Sadie McKee (1934) are other examples of tantalizing dialogues whose style would not survive once Joseph Breen’s Code was implanted after 1934′s second midyear.

In Bombshell and The Girl from Missouri (both included in the Jean Harlow’s 100th Anniversary Collection) we can appreciate the subtle divergences between two outwardly similar scions, differentiated by Tone’s highly perceptive acting. While in Bombshell his character Gifford Middleton is a fake aristocrat (played with a straight face) hired to placate Lola’s longing to escape her oppresive career demands, in The Girl from Missouri the insolent T.R. Paige Jr. feels so disconcerted by Harlow’s refusal (“You can make me cheap and common like a million others but, gee, I wish you wouldn’t”), that we see literally Paige’s cynicism dismantled for good when Eadie (Harlow’s ‘hotsy totsy’ chorus girl) disarms Tone’s character using only her sincere tears.

No doubt, the final (tender and arousing) scene when Paige forces Eadie into the bath stall never ceases to touch me seeing how Tone’s spoiled heir transmogrifies into a devoted Romeo under the purifying shower rain. It was really a watershed moment from his Pre-Code period, one of his most emotive performances as romantic saviour.

Maybe the duality inherent to a stage-trained actor which Tone reckoned so well: “Actors suffer from being half narcissistic and half self-critical”, confered him a special complexity which he would never shy away from. Franchot Tone was one of the original members of the Group Theater (1931-1940), the first acting company to bring Stanislavski’s revolutionary technique to America. Tone was also the first to leave the Group for Hollywood, shortly followed by John Garfield. Stanislavski’s concept of Emotional Memory proved to be decisive in a number of Tone’s dialethic portraits that made him stand out from the Hollywood’s histrionic style typical of his era.

One master example appears in Borzage’s Three Comrades, scripted by F. Scott Fitzgerald, where Tone’s character Otto Koster shows us his internal dialogue surreptitiously but without leaving room for doubt about his love for Patricia (Margaret Sullavan) or his Comrades (Robert Taylor and Robert Young). In 1957 Tone recorded a reading of Fitzgerald’s classics in The Jazz Age of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Readings by Franchot Tone The Great Gatsby, This side Of Paradise, The Crack-up, their mythical quality heightened by his suggestive voice. That same year Tone received praising reviews for his thespian talents in the Broadway play A Moon For The Misbegotten. During this time he was married to actress Dolores Dorn. It was his last marriage (1956-1959) which would repeat the same tumultuous pattern than his previous marital unions.

The most lacerating of his four complicated marriages was to the maligned actress Barbara Payton (1951-1952). The romantic trio Payton-Tone-Neal made gruesome headlines when Tone suffered a cerebral concussion and facial injuries caused by a fistfight with B-actor Tom Neal. Irony is not lost on those noir stalwarts, because the most noirish film (Detour, starring Tom Neal) would pale in comparison with the real thing. Plastic surgery was needed to restore Tone’s broken nose and cheek, and Tone would divorce Payton after a string of unsavory arguments. “I was engaged to the actor with the most class in Hollywood-Franchot Tone,” remembered Barbara in her memoirs I Am Not Ashamed (1963), “my biggest moment was 1950 on St. Valentine’s Day. I went with Franchot Tone to the opera. It was heaven.”

Franchot, like the jaded and cryptic protagonists from the gritty pulps, felt irresistibly attracted to provocative beauties. In I Love Trouble (based on Roy Huggins’s novel The Double Take), the flaxen-haired temptress (Adele Jergens) who lies on his bed amuses him to no end. However, Stuart Bailey is love struck over Janet Blair’s character, who rectifies his deductions and guides him on the right track. Franchot actually becomes Bailey by virtue of a prodigious performance, rendering the insouciant detective persona (clearly inspired by the iconic Philip Marlowe) in an enigmatically acerbic fashion. “I’d like to play it like the bored detective who knows everything before it happens,” Bailey jokes. The incisive way Franchot submerges into the laconic wisecracks and hard-boiled gestures puts him in the same league than Bogart in The Big Sleep or Dick Powell in Murder, My Sweet. In fact, Huggins’ novel is very reminiscent of Chandler’s The Lady in the Lake, centering around the deceitful identity of a fallen woman (in this case, Janie Joy, “luscious as a pomegranate, and twice as acid”).

This is my favorite performance of Tone in the 1940s decade, superseding the old gumshoe’s cockiness by enacting an almost inert representation of masculinity, notwithstanding charged with prolonged sexual desire. Norma Shannon (Janet Blair) ponders: “You’re a highly improbable character, Mr. Bailey. Did someone just dream you up?,” while Bailey adumbrates her image inside his mind: “Her cobalt eyes had widened. Then her eyebrows raised and she took on a look of earnest sympathy. Acute cynicism. I suppose it’s an occupational disease, isn’t it?”

Franchot Tone was paradoxically a feminist, and “he encouraged all the women in his life”, as Lisa Burks (who is planning a biography on Tone) affirms. In Uncle Vanya (1958) “Mr. Tone contributes a thoughtful, sensitive and wholly striking portrayal. Although he knows it is the fate of intelligent men to be called ‘odd,’ he is lucid and straight about his approach to truth”, The New York Times acclaimed, “a subdued but shining performance that registers just as clearly as Chekhov’s words.” Franchot continued performing throughout the 1950′s combining his Hollywood career with his devotion for Broadway’s theatre.

Franchot Tone pushed the limits and constraints of Hollywood displaying an entire spectrum of psychologically inescapable reactions, opposite to the good guy/bad guy dichotomy prevalent in the Golden Age. Mysterious, suave and mentally keen, Franchot Tone managed to create contradictory heroes and charming villains empathising with their human flaws, unafraid of the benighted human condition which through those diverse (yet akin) portrayals presented itself. The means whereby Franchot Tone approached to these characters was beyond an acting System or Method, he just relied on his journey as he’d say: ‘through this jungle of illusion each and every one of us are living in.’ Article first published as Franchot Tone: From Pre-Code Romance to Film Noir on Blogcritics.

Franchot Tone's theatrical origins, with Joan Crawford in Hollywood

"In 1935, when I was twelve, I saw Franchot Tone in the earliest version of the film 'Mutiny on the Bounty.' I sat in a dark movie house, my knees pressed up against the unoccupied seat in front of me. Tone played one of the officers who mutinied against the cruel Captain Bligh (Charles Laughton) whom they put overboard into a small lifeboat and abandoned to the open sea. The crew and officers returned to Tahiti. It was an exuberant story. The great ship moved through the waves, the masts creaked, the sails billowed as crew members shouted across the decks to one another amid ocean spray.

Then they were in Tahiti, and Franchot Tone, wearing a sarong, a wreath of large, white-petaled blossoms hanging from around his neck, stood close to a beautiful, young Tahitian woman.

Another fleshy fellow in the cast was the star of the movie, Clark Gable, a large man whose acting I found severely limited. I paid him no attention. My knees slipped down from seatback to floor.

I leaned forward, enraptured by Tone, his delicate features, his narrow-lipped mouth, the irony I thought implicit in his remote smile that assured me “I’m superior to all this play-acting...” and above all, by what I perceived as his nature, quixotic and spiritual. I had been struck a great blow by the force of movie love.

Later, in 1939, on spring vacation from a Montreal boarding school, I saw Tone in a Group Theatre production of 'The Gentle People.' My father, a screenwriter at the time, knew the business manager of the Group, Walter Fried, whom he called “Cousin Wally.” Fried arranged for me to see the play. On the evening I attended the play, Cousin Wally told me through the box office grill that he had arranged for the cast to meet for drinks in a small frowzy bar across the street from the theatre. Would I like to join them there? After the final curtain fell, I walked over to the bar, uneasy yet exalted. But Tone didn’t turn up, although the rest of the cast were there.

A few days later, I bought a book, Trivia, by an English writer, Logan Pearsall Smith, and along with a letter, sent it via Cousin Wally to Tone. As I think back now, it seems to me that Fried was highly amused by the entire incident. I hardly recall my letter. It was probably an effort to differentiate myself from his other admirers, and to praise the book for qualities that would attest to my own sensibilities. Cousin Wally told me later that Franchot had assembled the cast and read my letter aloud to them. Yet he answered it. Joy leapt into me when I saw the envelope. His reply was cordial, intimate, I judged. But I was faintly distressed by what I sensed was a distancing sardonic note it had. I kept his reply in a file cabinet in the cellar. One morning a local water main burst. A flood resulted and it took many hours for firemen to pump out the six feet of water. Tone’s letter was ruined along with other correspondence and some book contracts.

One rainy afternoon in Hollywood, where we lived, I drove in the rain to a local drugstore to get a prescription. As I hastened back to where I had parked, on tiptoe to avoid the deeper puddles of water, a voice from a parked car inquired, “Where are your ballet slippers?” It was Franchot Tone. My heart raced as I smiled in his direction but I hurried to my car through the rain which had gotten suddenly heavier.

A few years later, back in New York city, I went to see a movie of his, 'Five Graves to Cairo,' at the Paramount Theatre in the Broadway district. The sidewalk was crawling with adolescent girls, agitated, some crying, others laughing, as they left their places in the line to dance a few steps on the street. The girls had all come to see and hear Frank Sinatra. The name meant nothing to me. The last time I saw Tone was in a small shop on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan. The optician who owned it was an old friend, and I had joined him for a brown-bag lunch. We were sitting at the rear of the narrow store, eating sandwiches when Tone, wearing a beret, opened the door and leaned in. In that first moment of my recognition of him, though like me he had grown much older —I lost my breath.

He smiled at me and it was such a lovely smile! All his old charm for me was in it. He asked Lou, my friend, when his eyeglasses would be ready. What I felt at that moment was beyond words. My hearing returned in time to hear Tone’s thanks and goodbye to Lou. Upon first seeing him years earlier, I had been astonished by the emotions his screen presence had brought to life in me. I had loved him, in a make-believe way —the way most emotion begins— for years. That intensity of feeling prepared me, in some fashion, for love itself, its contrarieties, its defeats, its beauty." -“Franchot Tone at the Paramount” from "News from the World: Stories and Essays" (2012) by Paula Fox

MGM's "Sadie McKee" (1934) -part of the Joan Crawford DVD collection vol. 2- marked the beginning of a serious relationship to her co-star, Franchot Tone. It is a superb example of how the "committee" system of moviemaking in the 1930s could sometimes yield unexpected delights. Sadie's former boss Michael (Franchot Tone), the one true love of her life, waits and waits and waits to see what's really on the girl's mind! And as a bonus, this is the film that introduced the peppy ditty "All I Do Is Dream of You". The labyrinth plotline of Sadie McKee is proof enough that more than one screenwriter had a hand in its creation: but instead of chaos, the film is irresistibly watchable, full of unexpected plot twists and marvelous little surprises. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Sadie is 'adopted' by a streetwise woman – Opal (Jean Dixon) – that works in a nightclub (where Akim Tamiroff is the headwaiter). When one of the club’s patrons gets fresh with now cigarette girl hostess Sadie, a kindly drunken multimillionaire named Jack Brennan 'rescues' her. Sadie is surprised to learn that Michael is Jack’s lawyer, and is so upset when he tries to protect his client from her – as if she’s a gold-digger – that she decides to become one. A short time after marrying Jack, Sadie learns that her husband is dying; this comes right after she’d gone to see Dolly’s show to see Tommy, who’d sung his signature song "All I Do Is Dream Of You", which stirred up past emotions for both of them.

But it’s Michael, feeling guilty for his prior meddling in their lives, that finds Tommy first and puts him in a sanitarium where he might recover, but he doesn’t. After Jack’s deathbed scene with Sadie, she returns to New York to live in an apartment with her mother and Opal. They are visited by Michael, who celebrates his birthday with Sadie. As they blow out the candles, it appears all has been forgiven and that her mother’s wish of them being together is in their future. Source: www.classicfilmguide.com

-Franchot Tone? “Everybody asks me that,” Joan says with cryptic amusement. “I give them an answer they can’t print. Here it is for you, too. ‘I really don’t know whether Mr. Tone will make an honest woman of me.’” -Los Angeles Times (1933)

Franchot Tone can always fall back on the Carborundum Company in a pinch. The Carborundum Company is really Frank J. Tone, Sr. (Franchot calls him) — and carborundum is really an artificial compound of carbon and silicon.

Franchot is an entity in his own right, a player of stage and screen who is distinguished from other players by a decisive speaking voice and a smile that hovers somewhat between cynicism and what Heywood Broun once described as "wist." It is the masculine counterpart, that smile, of the Mona Lisa's -and quite as provoking.

Cast as 'Gentleman': Because he is stiffly erect, well mannered and usually unruffled, Hollywood is wont to cast him as a "gentleman” (slightly caddish). He doesn't mind this role especially, although he would prefer to be given parts in which he would be allowed to work with his hands, as he expresses it. He never wore a dress suit in all his seasons with the New Playwrights' Theater in Greenwich Village, the Theater Guild or the Group Theater, which last he helped organize—financially and otherwise.

He found working alongside Charles Laughton inspiring, in "Mutiny on the Bounty;" it enabled him to give what many will assay as his finest performance, although he himself singles out his lead in “Lives of a Bengal Lancer."

He most enjoyed playing with Joan in such films as "Today We Live," "Dancing Lady" and "Sadie McKee"—even though, he adds with a twinkle, he generally lost her to some luckier fellow. Tone objects to Hollywood on the grounds that it is either "all social or all work” with no happy medium. He is fond of music, and collects books on acting, some dating back to 1850. He smiled his quizzical smile at the mention, in his studio biography, that "he loves to study philosophy" and is partial to golf and riding. "I don't believe I've played golf or read a book in ten years. As for riding, they should have seen me falling off horses in ‘Bengal Lancers,’" he remarked facetiously.

"The House of Connelly" by Paul Green. Martin Beck Theater, September 28, 1931. It was the first production of the Group Theater, directed by Lee Strasberg. Cast: Morris Carnovsky, Mary Morris, Eunice Stoddard, Stella Adler and Franchot Tone.

Tone's eyes gleamed with enthusiasm as he spoke of "the Stanislavsky system.” It is to this system, which he calls "a substitute for genius,” that he owes all practical knowledge of his profession, he declared—barring an apprenticeship as president of the Cornell Dramatic Club and a period of stock in Buffalo. “I came upon it in 1928," he explained, "in New York. We used it in the Group Theater. Its leading exponents were Ouspenskaya and Boleslawski. Boley is directing here at M.-G.-M. "We were taught to 'act' mentally working inside rather than out. It was not merely enough, of course to be 'filled up' inside; one needed the will to make one's feeling known. As a method it was opposed to the Comedie Françoise school, which advocates imitativeness—the “put the sob in it, boys!” sort of thing. As Boley said last week, “the ideal lies somewhere between the two.”

More than any single factor, one suspects, the Stanislavsky system has imprinted itself on Franchot Tone's nature, personally as well as professionally; he stepped into a technique ready made to his measure. He is of Irish descent, the French-sounding Franchot (Fran-sho) having been inherited from his mother's line. It's the Irish part that may furnish a key to the wist in his smile. -"Franchot Tone, Distinguished by Decisive Voice and 'Mona Lisa' Smile" (1935) by Philip K. Scheuer for Los Angeles Times

On Hollywood: “Certain types of artists can’t handle it. In some ways, it killed Odets. It certainly killed Franchot Tone. He couldn’t live with that divided spirit. He couldn’t live with that — or Joan Crawford.” -Stella Adler on America's Master Playwrights (2013) Source: www.nytimes.com

Franchot Tone: "Joan has had problems of her own in the past few months. Not only did she suffer from an unhappy marriage, but she was tortured by untrue gossip and unfair reports in the public prints. You would think that she had enough on her mind with her own problems... But, no! She has to fret about the problems of a dozen or so other people. She is," he added, very solemnly, "a great woman. And that is not an adjective that I use often or carelessly. I think that about Joan." -"Joan Crawford: The Most Remarkable Girl in Hollywood" (1934) by Helen Louise Walker (Silver Screen magazine)

At college Franchot was preeminent in dramatics and scholarship, being president of the dramatic club and a Phi Beta Kappa. To his staid parents' astonishment he accepted a job as the juvenile in a Buffalo stock company as soon as he had graduated. "I made forty a week -- while it lasted!" he recounts. "I headed for Broadway and fame when that 'tryout' was over. Only -- fame kept at a respectful distance from me. For weeks I pounded the pavements! At last I persuaded a little theatre organization in Greenwich Village to allow me to illustrate how well I could enact the lead in the first production. I read the part with profound confidence. They rewarded me with a supporting role. It was a hectic but stimulating existence from then on. Good plays and bad ones, strong parts and poor ones. Finally I got into Katharine Cornell's 'The Age of Innocence.'" That brought the Hollywood bid.

"I felt that posing for portraits and autographing books for fans was a form of exhibitionism. At premieres I used to blush violently when noticed and I'd scribble my name in the fans' books so fast I scarcely knew what I was doing. Joan showed me how wrong I was. She convinced me that a picture player is not making a fool of himself when he acknowledges the public's curiosity. She believes one should be very grateful to the fans for their approval. I agree now that I've reasoned it out."

The lessons in showmanship have modulated his reserve. He still lacks the spectacular quality which big stars have, but it can be developed since he is no longer inhibited by self-consciousness. He is endeavoring to discover just what kind of publicity is best. "When I see how writers have badgered Joan, particularly when she announced her separation from Doug, I shudder at the dangers one can encounter by being too kind to the press!"

There are many details of the actual camera work which he has had to master, and on which Joan helped him. "My gestures were quicker than they should be for the screen and Joan slowed me down. Then the speed with which scenes are taken confused me. It is difficult to rise to a climax with no preliminaries, as we have on the stage." "From all appearances Franchot is the most indifferent person in the world," Joan began as we sat in her portable dressing room on the "Dancing Lady" set. "Then you begin your scene with him and are astounded to find you are working with the keenest of actors. Technically, he is perfect. He knows how to express every kind of feeling instantly!"

"I have no technique at all for myself. I'm all emotion and when I cry, for instance, I keep on until I'm cried out. I'd give anything to be as skilled in acting as he is. But he learned his technique on the stage and you can't develop any in films." And speaking of analyzing reminded Joan that Franchot is the most logical man she has ever known.

"He has taught me to curb relying upon my intuition. If someone hurts him he doesn't lose his temper. He sits in a corner quietly and reasons out why. When people have said sarcastic things to or about me I've cried. But he has shown me that they must have had a motive for being mean. And when you search for it you recognize their purpose and aren't hurt." Doug Jr. thrilled her when she was impressed with superficial glory. Franchot stands for maturity, conservative achievement. "I have learned peace of mind from Franchot," Joan concluded. "He has taught me to have faith in my own judgement. And, oh yes -he reads aloud to me! All the grandest plays and 'Alice in Wonderland.' I'd never read it!" -"Joan Unmasks Hollywood for Franchot Tone" (Screenland magazine, December 1933)

Siodmak's "Phantom Lady": 70th Anniversary

"When she appeared at the dining room entrance presently, she was hatless, and he was surprised at how much the hat had been able to do for her. There was something flat about her. The light had gone out; the impact of her personality was soggy, limp. She was just some woman in black, with dark brown hair; something that blocked the background, that was all. Not homely, not pretty, not tall, not small, not chic, not dowdy... just colorless, just a common denominator of all feminine figures everywhere. A cipher. A composite. It was only in the foyer that she finally put her hat on again. And at once she came alive, she was something, somebody, again." -Phantom Lady (1942) by Cornell Woolrich

Siodmak's breakthrough in Hollywood, Phantom Lady (1944) would also represent one of Cornell Woolrich's most identifying and defining writings in his homonymous novel (penned in 1942 under the pseudonym "William Irish"). Translated through an uneven screenplay by Bernard C. Schoenfeld (co-writer of The Dark Corner and Caged), Woolrich's story revolved around a beautiful and loyal secretary (Carol 'Kansas' Richman, played by Ella Raines) trying to absolve her boss of the charge of his wife's murder brought against him. The first part of the film narrates how Scott Henderson (an engineer played by Alan Curtis) fails to reconnect with his only alibi: a mysterious lady (Ann Terry, played by Fay Helm) with whom he had spent the night after a bitter argument with his wife. The film's explicit working title was Condemned to Hang and was released in USA on January 28, 1944 (just two months before another noir masterpiece sourced in crime fiction: Double Indemnity).

The most impressive similarity with Woolrich's novel was the emphasis on Carol (encouraged by producer Joan Harrison, a former assistant of Hitchcock who defined herself as a 'twarthed writer'), and her multiple transformations throughout the tense and turbulent plot. She oscillates between the dutiful stenographer (secretly in love with her boss), a vengeaful Gorgoneia and a 'hep kitten' floozie. Ella Raines becomes the absolute moral center, mesmerizing us and the rest of the characters with her resplendent orbs and sharp sleuthing skills. Despite not having received great appraisal at the time, Ella Raines renders the most interesting portrayal of her underrated career by becoming an unassailable noir heroine.

A remarkable departure from the novel is the dandified figure of the villain, Jack Marlow (played by Franchot Tone), who wouldn't appear for the first 45 minutes. Tone approached this "psychopatic intellectual" by documenting his role attending sessions with a psychiatrist in Beverly Hills. His is one of the most memorable maniacs on film, due to the exquisitely amoral performance elicited by Tone, specially harrowing during his last scene with Raines. Tone's character feels that the sense of stable hierarchy has become increasingly exhausted in the Big City, without clear rules to abide by.

This polluted urban honeycomb and their inhabitants' scattered emotions lead Marlow to suffer migraines, nervous tics and eventually rabid madness, although he will deny suffering from any mental disorder, since he is utterly incapable of recognizing a madman when he's looking at his reflection in the mirror. Henderson's wife "was not in love with anyone but herself. She was the type that likes to flirt and string people along. She let him arrange his whole future around her, knowing darn well she wasn't going to be there to share it with him. She let him sign on for five years with this oil company in South America."

Marlow discloses to Carol his clandestine love affair with his best friend's wife : "I never liked cities. The noise, confusion, the dirt. They hate me because I'm different from them. I don't belong here. Neither do you. You should have never come to New York. Never met Scott. The world's full of men like him! You can buy nice stupid people a dime a dozen! Never allowed myself to love anybody before. I was always naïve about women."

The filthy aspects from the city's underground are faithfully captured in the drum solo scene, brillianty delivered by Elisha Cook Jr. (Cliff), his syncopated lust for Carol/Jeannie projecting a radical antagonism to Marlow's brainy sublimity. In the novel, Carol briefly escapes the intoxicating jazz dive: "the open air made her almost light-headed, it was so cool and rare and crystal clear after that fever chamber. She thought she'd never breathed anything so sweet and pure before. She leaned there against the side of the building, drinking it in, her cheek pressed to the wall like someone prostrated."

Woolrich's poetic lines ("An up and down intersection glided by beneath him like a slightly depressed asphalt stream bed") were matched or even surpassed by Siodmak's translucent lighting and spectral atmosphere.

The coveted orange hat featuring a sequined double bird appliqué (an exclusive design which is copied by the titular Phantom Lady) is equally transfixing in the film context as it was conjured on page, symbolizing a vain attempt to control our vagrant fates. Siodmak, who came from the Weimar cinema and had been censored in Germany for his occasionally racy mise en scène, wisely juxtaposed his masterly angled compositions (helped by cinematographer Woody Bredell) to Nietzschean paranoid ideas permeating Marlow's speech, creating a disconcertingly frightening effect in the viewer as a result.

This is one of the most delightfully perturbing entries from Siodmak's genial ouvre, available in DVD since last year. Highly recommended, not only for the fans of the noir genre, also for those admirers of German expressionism and inspired literary adaptations.

Article first published as 'Phantom Lady's’ Sixtieth Anniversary on Blogcritics.