Phantom Lady

Phantom Lady (1944)

Runtime: 87 minutes

Directed by: Robert Siodmak

Starring: Alan Curtis, Ella Raines, Franchot Tone, Aurora Miranda, Elisha Cook, Jr.

From: Universal

I returned to the world of film noir due to a messageboard suggestion and it was a good one... both the suggestion and the movie. I talk about it in my Letterboxd review below:

This was another messageboard recommendation; someone stated that this would be on TCM and they rated it highly. I figured it was time I saw another film noir so I went with this, and it was a swell recommendation.

The plot isn't too complex: a man's wife is murdered while he is out on the town. He (Scott Henderson) hangs out with a mysterious lady with a giant hat you'd expect to see a dame wear at the Kentucky Derby. They go to some places but the cops believe that the man murdered his wife and has no one seems to remember the titular phantom lady, he has no alibi so he is sentenced to death. His secretary “Kansas” (who has taken a fancy to him; she was played by the awesome and lovely Ella Raines) is not fine with his injustice so she wishes to exonerate him and she does so by meeting up with those people who claimed they saw Scott on that fateful night but not that woman.

Of course I don't want to reveal too much about the plot, except that it fits the genre like a glove. It has what you expect: tense moments, /light vs. shadows, moments of silence, the authorities not always getting it right, and as I have seen in a few movies already, scenes involving jazz; here, Elisha Cook Jr. is his usual skittish self as a jazz drummer. A big asset is Raines as Kansas. While she gets assistance from a sympathetic police detective, she is still great as she takes charge and goes to all the people responsible and asks why they lied.

While the complaints about the ending not quite fitting the rest of the picture is valid to me, I understand it was the Hays Code which required such a thing and I did not let it bother me too much. It's still a solid example of a film noir and like I said, that recommendation did not lead me astray.