THE BLACK WIDOW

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 814, 4 March 1955, Page 19

THE BLACK WIDOW

(20th Century-Fox-CinemaScope) INCE those productions which I have myself seen represent only a fragment of the CinemaScope corpus (I hope the studios don’t mind the term), I can’t be too absolute in my statements about The Black Widow. I don’t think I. want to be, anyway. It is a routine» sort of whodunit with a plausible» plot, -a competent cast, pretty smooth direction by Nunnally Johnson (who Was also scriptwriter and _producer), and pleasant colour. But it did strike me as the most relaxed piece of CinemaScope I. had encountered, and I think that represents some sort of advance, if. not technically then emotionally. Until now (or so it has seemed) producers and directors have been fascinated, perhaps numbed, possibly even a little frightened by the amount of screen space at their disposal, and by the problem of rearranging the traditional material to fit it. The tendency has been to place the emphasis on action rather than acting, to fill up the available space with movement from left to right and back again--and so we have had King Arthur and his jolly jousting knights, and a number of other costume pieces in which most of the drama has been horizontal (and sometimes even flat). There has not been what the ad-men might call an intelligent use of blank , Space-or . unpopulated space. The background of The Black Widow, however, fits fairly precisely into the frame of the CinemaScope screen. The setting is, for a substantial part of the time, an opulent New York penthouse apartment-wide, handsome, but not too high-and with that detail settled Mr. Johnson appears to have felt himself free to concentrate on the cast. Occasionally he nods, and then you get the Wimbledon Effect, as two characters engage in a bout of conversational pat-ball from opposite sides. of the screen, like the end-men in a Christy Minstrel show. But in. general the ‘camera follows the players and allows us. to concentrate on the acting. It’s on the whole smoother and more competent acting than I’ve noticed in the spectacular CinemaScope _ productions. Van Heflin appears as a Broadway producer who foolishly (but quite without ulterior motive) allows a young wench the freedom of his apartment while his wife is absent; then finds himself caught in a web of circumstantial evidence when the wench (Peggy Ann Garner) is found hanging among the sponge-bags in the bathroom. The evidence, however, is so strong against him that no self-respecting sleuth could take it seriously, so one or two other suspects are rung in, to keep things simmering until the final show-down. One of the pleasing things about the show, beyond an unobtrusive competence, is the neat way in which tension is built up to the climax. The director. has devised a pair of adroit flashback passages in which image dnd narration overlap one another and these are effectively, used to lead into the dénouement. What the dénouement is you may not guess-unless you saw the’ trailer the week before.