The Unsuspected (1947)

Posted on November 22, 2025 by 4 Star Films

The Unsuspected has a delicious opening dripping with a foreboding chiaroscuro atmosphere. It’s the dead of night. There’s a woman on the telephone tucked away in a back room. The familiar face of Audrey Totter picks up on the other end of the line. She’s out enjoying herself at a club with some male company.

Someone emerges and descends on the flustered secretary. Moments later, she winds up hung from the ceiling — a grisly murder framed as suicide. For ’40s Hollywood, it doesn’t pull punches.

Since Totter is a consummate femme fatale, it’s easy to question what angle she could possibly have in this whole affair. We don’t have the answers, and so we must follow the rest of the film to find out; it’s a genuine pleasure to be afforded the opportunity.

If it’s not apparent already, we are in the hands of professionals with Warner Bros. stalwart Michael Curtiz directing a screenplay by Ranald MacDougall and the director’s wife, Bess Meredyth.

The film is dressed up nicely for a bit of noirish drama with the added benefit of the shadowy, gothic interiors when the story moves to the abode of one Victor Grandison (Claude Rain), a revered radio mystery performer who is reeling after the death of his secretary and the loss of his beloved niece who perished recently at sea.

Rains is an actor with such poise and regality, but building off his turn in Notorious, he plays another complicated figure. It’s a role worthy of his talents, and he anchors a packed menagerie of the usual suspects.

Totter as the sultry Althea always seems to take vindictive pleasure in playing the venomous harlot, and she’s just about one of the best from the era. With her arched eyebrows and intense eyes, she reflects the perfect epitome of an opportunistic, venomous vamp. Though it’s possible she only looks the part. Other people are willing to stoop to murder.

Her inebriated wet noodle of a husband (Hurd Hatfield) feels like a non-entity in comparison, and that’s precisely the point. Fred Clark always has a shifty authority about him, and he’s a close associate of Grandison. Over time, we realize he’s actually the local police detective, a handy man to have as a friend…

The ubiquitous Classic Hollywood heavy Jack Lambert is introduced in one lingering shot, looking out the window of some dive hotel window. What could he have to do with all of this? It’s difficult to implicate him immediately, but we know he’s waiting there for something.

Constance Bennett might just be the finest addition to the cast. She was the wit and experience like Eve Arden a la Mildred Pierce, both beautiful and able to trade banter and wisecracks with just about anyone. She lends a sense of levity to a movie that might otherwise feel oppressively dour. In some ways, she lives above the fray of everyone else, providing a kind of narrative escape valve for the audience.

If you think you already have a line on The Unsuspected, it’s a joy to mention it’s a movie full of perplexing wrinkles. A mysterious stranger (Michael North) shows up on their doorstep unannounced like a specter, and he asks to see Grandison. His next claim is even more outlandish: This young man, Steven Howard, was secretly married to Grandison’s niece Matilda.

Then, a dead person is resurrected like an apparition. Joan Caulfield’s character suffers from a cruel lapse in memory. What happened to her? I should have noted it sooner, but she has the aura like Gene Tierney in Laura, down to the portrait.

Like that picture, it’s a movie spent deciphering people’s motives; it feels like everyone is keeping secrets and no one wants to tell. Is it a case of elaborate gaslighting? It’s not unthinkable in the noir worlds of the 1940s, and Caufield is a ready victim, so sweet and innocent.

What are we to think? Who can we trust? In taxicabs, we find conspirators of a different kind — those trying to ascertain the truth behind a suicide. Because they know there is more than meets the eye.

Matilda returns to her home, lighting it up with the glow of her virginal white countenance in the dark recesses of the family mansion. It feels like oil and water. She does not belong there, but the story is still unresolved. There are several skin-crawling moments as Matilda is subjected to danger with a touch of Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941). Something’s not quite right, but perhaps her mind is playing tricks…We know she’s not crazy.

It might be low-hanging fruit, but the crucial nature of the antagonist makes the film feel like an early precursor to the Columbo series. Although we don’t know everything right away, eventually the audience is given the keys to the murder, and we must sit back in earnest to watch how they play out, from botched murders to car chases with the police toward the city dump.

I’m also intrigued by the trappings offered by murder mystery radio programs, and though they are used in other films like Abbott and Costello’s Who Done It?, to my knowledge, they aren’t as prevalent in Classical Hollywood as one might imagine.

There’s a delightful meta-quality with Grandison narrating plotlines that played out in the story around him, adding another perturbing layer for the filmmakers to play with. It feels especially fitting here, thanks to Rains’s mellifluous voice and the continued prevalence of mystery and true crime stories to this day. It seems like we still can’t get enough of them over 75 years later. The Unsuspected represents the best of Warner Bros. and the mystery genre, wrapped up in a movie that rarely gets talked about.

4/5 Stars

Jane Eyre (1943)

Posted on February 1, 2018 by 4 Star Films

Are you always drawn to the loveless and unfriended? ~ Edward Rochester

When it’s deserved. ~ Jane Eyre

I can still recall visiting the Bronte Parsonage, marveling at the fact that these sisters were able to have such a lasting impact on the world of literature — a world so often dominated by men at that time — and I simultaneously rued the fact that I had yet to crack open any of their works. Now several years down the road, I still have not opened up Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre by Emily and Charlotte Bronte and so I can only come into this 20th-century adaptation with certain expectations.

I realize that no film can wholly represent every page of a novel — especially of great length — because in a practical sense it’s simply not theatrically possible. But my hope is that at the very least this version of Jane Eyre maintains the essence of the source material and if nothing else I can revel in the fact that it is a thoroughly engrossing film from director Robert Stevenson.

It feels like some sort of intriguing marriage between Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre and the recent craze of gothic fiction adaptations — the most noted of course being Hitchcock’s Rebecca only a few years prior — that by some strange happenstance had input from Aldous Huxley. Here we have the ever timid beauty Joan Fontaine starring once more, this time opposite Welles. But the story starts at a much earlier point in the life of Jane Eyre.

Her life is a desolate and horrible affair as we soon find out, due in part to a caustic culture that uses their religion to ostracize others instead of bringing them into the fold of society.

In fact, most of those who hold a Christian belief system are puritanical and more problematic still, hard-hearted. Ironically, there’s no room for grace in the Christian faith that they practice. Foremost among this crowd is Mr. Brocklehurst (Henry Daniel) who runs the Lowood Institution for Girls.

It’s in this very issue revealed early on where the film finds much of its substance. Because thematically all throughout the narrative the audience is forced to grapple with various characters who are subjugated to the fringes of society and for various reasons are labeled as outcasts.

This is how Jane is seen first by her unfeeling aunt (Agnes Moorehead), then by the narrow-minded reverend. They seem absolutely incapable of compassion sitting atop their high horses of proclaimed humility and charity. In reality, they have very little of either to offer. A few do show her kindness including Dr. Rivers (John Sutton) and the cook Bessie (Sarah Allgood) but such behavior is the exception and not the norm.

Still, Jane the very person who has been relegated to a wretched and lesser state is for that very reason ready and willing to reach out to those around her who are treated likewise. The very fact that she has been marginalized allows her to see it in others and be compelled to move toward them when others move away. She cares deeply for the outsider.

The most galvanizing experience involves her closest friend as a young girl (played by a child who still is very unmistakably Elizabeth Taylor). Then as she grows up and chooses to move away from the oppression of her surrogate home, it is the role of a governess in a gothic manor that once more allows her the opportunity to extend her graces to others. First in the form of the precocious ballerina extraordinaire (Margaret O’Brien) and then the brusque but obviously tortured man of the house (Orson Welles).

She sees in him something that runs deeper than the surface. He’s far from a bad man. In fact, she grows to love and cherish him because she sees the good that dwells in his conflicted soul. Burdened as he is with guilt and a past that still haunts him to the present moment. The film exhibits a bit of a love triangle as Rochester invites many guests to his estate among them the well-to-do Blanche Ingram (Hillary Brooke).

But the film pulling from its source material goes a step further still. It digs into the dark recesses, involving itself with the less than pleasant realities, namely an unseen person who hangs over the storyline like a specter. In those very designs, whether they are simply employing the rhythms of Bronte’s book or not, there’s another evident parallel there with the 1940 adaptation of du Maurier’s Rebecca.

Gothic tones matched with an impending sense of foreboding with the demure Fontaine similarly relating the action through voiceover even reading verbatim off the page as if from a diary. And once again it works. While there is no Mrs. Danvers, Welles has the same Shakespearian gravitas of an Olivier that accentuates the very modesty of many of Fontaine’s performances. Their exchanges reflect the sensibilities of the time but furthermore help draw up the very differences of their characters. However, as much as that juxtaposition would seem to draw them apart it even more passionately brings them together.

Some might find this rendition of Jane Eyre too stark, too much of a studio production, even too abrupt, but with Welles and Fontaine opposite each other, it’s a frequently enjoyable gothic romance. As much as gothic romances can possibly be enjoyable.

4/5 Stars

The Spiral Staircase (1945)

Posted on June 28, 2015 by 4 Star Films

The Spiral Staircase plays out like an Agatha Christie murder mystery with a moody, old mansion acting as the backdrop and numerous individuals filling out the cast. It seems to be some type of gothic-noir hybrid, with its ghostly interiors, torrential thunderstorms, and creaky shutters. However, with director Robert Siodmak at the helm, I am inclined to call it noir, not just because of his pedigree, but it certainly has the atmosphere and dim interiors that are expected of the genre.

The action opens at a movie hall after a woman is murdered by an unseen killer. But most of the actual drama takes place in the before mentioned mansion of the sickly Mrs. Warren (Ethel Barrymore). She resides with her son Steven and step-son Professor Albert Warren (George Brent) who never see eye to eye. Nearly on her deathbed, Mrs. Warren distrusts her nurse and only allows the mute girl Helen (Dorothy McGuire) to even help her. The rest of the cast is rounded out by servants, a secretary named Blanche (Rhonda Fleming) who Steven loves, and the constable and a young doctor who cares about Helen. It’s a wide array of figures and we quickly begin to analyze them for any hint of killer tendencies.

In fact, Helen is our main character and we experience much of the film from her perspective. The truth of the matter is that all the girls who were killed had some sort of defect, so the line of reasoning is that Helen might be next in line. It seems all too possible with a pair of mysterious eyes constantly watching from the shadows, but Helen does not heed Mrs. Warren’s advice to flee.

The film ultimately spirals into darkness as the killer takes one victim and looks for another. Helen must protect herself, while also confronting her past where the source of her muteness lies. Although simple in conception, The Spiral Staircase is no less an engaging mystery. It is not the best from Siodmak either, but Dorothy McGuire gives an expressive performance that deliverers so much heart and feeling without the use of words.

However, the film does ultimately allow her to find her inner voice in the midst of all the silence. She finally conquers the fear in the moment when it is most harrowing. Although her role is rather minor, Rhonda Fleming is as strikingly beautiful as ever. It’s a rather expected resolution, but there are enough quirks and twists to makes things enjoyable to the end. It goes without saying that gothic noir most definitely should be a thing if it isn’t already.

4/5 Stars

Rebecca (1940) – Alfred Hitchcock

Posted on October 9, 2013 by 4 Star Films

This film directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring Laurence Olivier with Joan Fontaine, was adapted from the Daphne du Maurier novel of the same name. The story begins in Monte Carlo where Max De Winter (Olivier) and a young woman (Fontaine) have a chance meeting as she is working for an older lady. Soon she learns that his previous wife died the year before. Fairly soon the two of them are attracted to each other and Max has plans of marriage and returning to his Manderley. However, back home the fairy tale is over and the new Mrs. De Winter is constantly tormented by the housekeeper Mrs. Danvers. Pretty soon Max himself seems to have changed. Confused Mrs. De Winter must learn what happened to Rebecca, the lady who was so enchanting. When she actually finds out the truth it is almost too much to bear. Like many Hitchcock films this one is certainly worth watching and it was actually his first American film. Olivier, Fontaine, George Sanders, and Judith Anderson all have very good performances.