Phantom Lady (1944, Robert Siodmak) (Patreon)

59/100

Second viewing, last seen at Film Forum in 1997 (as part of a massive noir series titled "Chandler, Hammett, Woolrich, and Cain"). My memories were distant but very fond, and I'm heavily bummed to discover that this Woolrich adaptation exemplifies that most maddening of disappointments, the Movie That's Flat-Out Phenomenal Until One Specific Development Flushes It Right Down The Toilet. Little fault to find with the first half, which establishes a sure-fire premise—not only can nobody find the woman who'd be some nondescript engineer's alibi for his wife's murder, but all of the people who saw them together mysteriously claim he was out alone—and then unleashes a positively predatory Ella Raines upon the case, creating the only combination femme fatale + lovelorn amateur gumshoe that I can recall offhand. Siodmak shoots Carol as if she were the villain rather than the protagonist, placing her in deep shadow and at foreboding distances; the extended sequence that sees her silently stare daggers at a bartender night after night and then finally tail him home is so unnerving that his abortive attempt to push her in front of an oncoming train almost seems like justifiable self-defense. Exemplary use of monochrome lighting effects—one jail scene almost certainly inspired Joel and Ethan's positioning of a high barred window to illuminate Freddy Riedenschneider's Uncertainty Principle monologue—and the film achieves its symbolic climax when Carol goads Elisha Cook, Jr. into a frenzied drum solo dementedly lascivious enough to make you wonder how the censors let it slide. Apart from Alan Curtis coming across like discount Clark Gable at the outset, it's all magnificently evocative and perverse, taking full advantage of Raines' unusual ability to shift from warm to ice cold on a dime. 

And then Franchot Tone shows up, 47 minutes in (despite being top-billed), and proceeds to torch the joint. I'm by no means Tone-deaf—he's terrific in Five Graves to Cairo, solid in Lives of a Bengal Lancer, great fun in his Twilight Zone episode ("The Silence," about a totally non-supernatural STFU wager). But just dreadful here, constantly twitching and grimacing in a hackneyed effort at conveying mental instability. In theory, I quite like the unorthodox structural gambit of introducing Marlow as the killer (can't accurately say "revealing," since we've never seen him before; name's mentioned in passing early on, that's it) about halfway through, with subsequent suspense derived from Carol's ignorance that she's teamed up with the very psychopath she seeks. But Tone's hamminess, in tandem with the screenplay's abrupt shift into a much more conventionally menacing register (which Siodmark unfortunately honors on the formal level), couldn't be in starker or more destructive tonal opposition to the razor-sharp intrigue that precedes it. Apparently the happy ending's a studio imposition, too, but that doesn't bother me nearly as much as seeing a singular '40s noir get replaced by something flat and ordinary. Small wonder that my long-term memory opted to retain the superlative aspects and ditch the rest.