PHANTOM LADY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 267, 4 August 1944, Page 20

PHANTOM LADY

(Universal)

O Whom It May Concern (and it should concern everyone who likes a good and unusual picture) This is to introduce Miss

Joan Harrison, aged 34, who used to be Alfred Hitchcock’s secretary, and who is now winning another victory for the feminist movement by proving herself almost as good as her former boss and better than two ordinary men when it comes to making a motion picture. Miss Harrison’s first assignment as a fullyfledged producer is Phantom Lady: for technique and edge-of-the-seat action it leaves most Hollywood thrillers in the also-ran class, Phantom Lady has all the plot ingredients of a commonplace shockera murdered wife, a husband wrongly accused, a paranoic killer, a bunch of detectives, an insane woman, dark streets and dirty deeds. It might have been terrible, but isn’t. And though the film never quite achieves the polish and sinister suspense of Hitchcock in his best Shadow of a Doubt mood, it is easy to see where Miss Harrison got some of her ideas from. It is also easy to see that she has some ideas of her own. Most of the action revolves round a hat — an exotic contraption, for the designing of which a certain Mr. Kenneth Hopkins is given a line all to himself among the credit titles. Perhaps he deserves it. The Hat is worn in the first sequence by a silent, melancholy Lady drinking by herself in a bar. She is persuaded by a distraught young architect (Alan Curtis) who has had a row with his wife, to accompany him to a theatre for which he has bought tickets. There she is winked at by the drummer in the orchestra, and glared at by the Mexican singer on the stage ‘because she is wearing exactly the same model hat as the singer. After the show the Lady disappears into the night, leaving no name. The young man returns to his flat where he finds that his wife has been strangled in his absence and detectives are in possession. His only alibi is the Lady in the Hat, but she has disappeared — and neither the bartender, nor the taxi-driver who took them to the theatre, nor the drummer boy, nor the Mexican singer, can be persuaded to remember having seen either her or her headgear. The law is satisfied about the young man’s guilt. Not so his secretary (Ella Raines), nor the detective in charge of the case (Thomas Gomez). With only a week or so to. go before the unfortunate architect is executed for murder, they join forces unofficially to try to discover who was willing to take so much trouble and pay so much money to cause those lapses of memory in so many people. But just when the bartender is on the verge of remembering that both the Phantom Lady and her phantom hat were as substantial as flesh and trimmings could make them, he is run over by a car; the drummer boy is strangled; and the Mexican singer leaves town. About this point the story drops its mystery by disclosing that the person responsible for all this loss of memory and life is the condemned man’s friend (Franchot Tone). But it drops comparatively little of its sinister suspense; for the culprit is suffering from a particularly nasty form of insanity which very nearly proves’ fatal to the heroine _ before it proves fatal to him,