Robinson plays a staid, middle-class college professor who teaches psychology at Gotham University. After seeing his wife and two children off at the train station -- they are embarking on a summer holiday -- Robinson's character, Richard Wanley, goes to his club for dinner with two cronies, a doctor and the City's District Attorney. The three men joke about being bachelors and accuse one another of various romantic misdemeanors. Wanley falls asleep reading a translation of the Song of Solomon, a glass of cognac in his hand. When the waiter at the club awakes him, Wanley goes outside pausing for a moment at a storefront to look at a painting of a beautiful woman. As he gazes at the portrait, the woman herself, clad entirely in funereal black appears. They talk and then go to a night club. After the bar, the woman invites Wanley to her apartment. One of the woman's other suitors (or customers -- she seems to be a call-girl) appears unexpectedly, attacks Wanley and there is a struggle. Wanley stabs the man to death with a scissors, a homicide that is clearly self-defense. But it's obvious that the circumstances of the killing, a brawl in a prostitute's apartment, will be ruinous to the professor. Accordingly, he conspires with the woman to dispose of the body in a remote wooded area somewhere a few miles from the city. Unfortunately, the man who was killed is an industrial magnate whose disappearance is immediately reported in the newspapers and whose body is discovered also within a day or two by an Eagle Scout. Each evening, Wanley, increasingly agitated, dines with the District Attorney who fills him in on the investigation that seems to be inevitably leading to his identification as the killer. Wanley even ends up at the place where he tried to dispose of the body, walking around in the woods with the DA (played suavely by Raymond Massey) and other cops; the femme fatale (Joan Bennett) is waiting in another squad car to tour the woods. The film's plot is strangely overdetermined. First, it's clear that Wanley will ultimately be apprehended by the DA and his sleuths. But,.then, a new peril is introduced, a sleazy ex-cop who has been trailing the deceased businessman knows that the call-girl is his mistress. The ex-cop goes to her apartment and blackmails her. Wanley and the woman meet and plot to kill the blackmailer with poison. But the scheme goes awry and, after the girl calls Wanley to tell him that she has failed, he takes the remainder of the poison himself and passes out, a clock ominously ticking on the soundtrack. Someone nudges him awake and we discover that the whole macabre adventure was a dream. Dorothy is now back in Kansas; the blackmailer is a doorman at the club; the captain of industry killed by Wanley is the hat-check man. Out on the street, Wanley pauses to look at the picture of the femme fatale in the window. When a tired-looking streetwalker asks him for a light, he says "Heavens no!" and scurries away into the night.
Lang's direction is mostly unobtrusive, but he provides subtle clues that the entire proceedings are a dream. There are strangely designed sets: the call-girl's apartment is accessed through two exterior glass doors and, then, an inside threshold where she often stands in silhouette posed against the light of her apartment. People are always passing through doors and corridors. Indeed, whole scenes are set in oddly liminal locations. The discussion in which Wanley and the woman plan to poison the blackmailer takes place in a sepulchral elevator lobby where cars full of people are continually going up and down, stopping at the floor to be rejected by the two doomed protagonists -- everyone else is going either up or down, but they are staying resolutely in place in the marble mausoleum limbo of the elevator lobby. When the woman invites Wanley into her apartment, she makes a slow dream-like transit of the room turning on three lights -- everything seems faintly balletic and sinister. The woman's apartment is full of strange perforated partitions and carytid-figures, ceramic forms upholding lamps and other objects. A labyrinth is inscribed around the maw of a big dark hearth in the apartment and the woman's double bed looks like a block of ice beyond open double-doors -- it is gleaming with white satin under a bedstead on which rococo terra-cotta putti support an overhead canopy. This bed is like no other bed on the face of the earth. Wanley's club-mates immediately discuss the disappearance and, then, murder of the industrial titan and the hero repeatedly blurts out incriminating remarks, duly noted but not otherwise registered by the DA. There are weird correspondences -- a pencil labeled with his initials "RW" mirrors a necklace with a pendant that is labeled "CM" (the dead man's name is Clyde Masard); the inversion of the "W"into an "M" reminds us of Lang's famous film "M" standing for "Murder". In half the shots clocks are ominously ticking although time seems alternately compressed or dilated -- we see clock faces repeatedly and there are strange visual leit motifs, for instance, a panama hat that Masard is wearing when he comes into the apartment and without any words, or even provocation, attacks Robinson. The hat recurs again and again worn by various characters even though Wanley has burned the item in his fireplace. In the car that transports Wanley to the corpse-disposal site, there is a strange-looking oculus where the rear window should be; this oculus recurs in the pharmacy where Wanley acquires the poison with which to kill the blackmailer. The blackmailer wears a version of CM's panama hat as does a police investigator at the scene where the body was discovered. (We've seen the hat on the courtesan's bed -- a bad omen.) In the strange elevator lobby, a man wearing this same hat bumps into the call-girl. When rain pours down on the street outside the call-girl's apartment, a tracking shot shows us the cheerless surroundings, shaggy with falling water and looking like some kind of Mesopotamian ruin. The film is dream-like even to the extent that it isn't like a dream -- in other words, it violates dream-logic. There is a long sequence in which the call-girl tries to seduce the villainous blackmailer -- Wanley is absent from this sequence and it seems unlikely that he would dream a scene in which he isn't present.
The film applies a scathing, ingenious nightmare logic to the situation. Wanley is doomed not because he has acted badly but merely because of his momentary temptation to visit the call-girl's apartment. Joan Bennet wears black with a mat of ebony feathers over her hair and she's an odd apparition. In the apartment scenes, she lounges around in clothing so sheer that she seems to be partly naked and her bosom is always heaving. The moment that Wanley errs, he is doomed not only because of the police and his own inclination to admit to the murder (something he attempts several times -- he's cronies just ignore his confessions) but also because of the ex-cop doubling on destiny up to hunt him down. A sense of mostly unmotivated guilt broods over every frame in the picture. There's even a bizarre suggestion that Wanley is destroyed over an inadequate object of desire -- the DA remarks that the woman isn't even attractive and that Clyde Masard "could have done much better". And the portrait in the window, against which we see faces reflected on the glass, is sinister-looking, a pale wraith with a long throat like pictures made by John Currin. This is an unsettling picture, extremely suspenseful, an elaboration on the notion that all men, even before they act, are guilty. Robinson is spooky -- he looks like a frightened iguana in his close-ups.
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