Robert Siodmak (1950)
Plenty of scenes take place at night: this and the elaborate noir shadows of George Barnes’s photography do more than reflect the morally dark goings-on – they make it sometimes difficult to see what’s happening on screen. What’s eventually clear, however, is that, as in The Suspect, Robert Siodmak is sympathetic towards the dodgy principals. There are two in this case – the titular woman-with-a-past (Barbara Stanwyck) and Cleve Marshall (Wendell Corey), the assistant district attorney who is soon besotted with Thelma. The people they kill or wrong are, like Charles Laughton’s victims in the earlier film, far from likeable. Although the wages of sin, crime and, in Cleve’s case, professional misconduct must ultimately be paid, Siodmak, working from a story and screenplay by Marty Holland and Ketti Frings respectively, presents the doing of justice dutifully, almost regretfully. (This is particularly so in the case of Cleve Marshall, who shares a surname with Laughton’s protagonist in The Suspect.)
The opening episode of the film is very effective. Cleve, who’s unhappily married and drinks too much, returns to the office late one evening and tells his troubles to his boss, Miles Scott (Paul Kelly), who’s heard them before. Scott, before he leaves, advises Cleve to get drunker and find himself a woman. Cleve already has a bottle to hand and the woman finds him: Thelma Jordon comes into the office to report prowlers around the home of the rich aunt with whom she lives. Wendell Corey lightens their first conversation with a well-judged pantomime of inebriation but I liked too the way that, when Thelma exits angrily, Cleve follows, entreating her not to go. There’s urgency in his pursuit of Thelma – in retrospect, a sense that Cleve was, almost explicitly, asking for it. Wendell Corey makes you believe in this man’s disillusionment: he sacrifices his family life and future as a lawyer because he’s crazy about Thelma but Cleve, from the start, feels so trapped in his marriage and job that preserving either might have made his life even worse. There are some sharp one-liners in exchanges with his wife Pam (Joan Tetzel) – as far as she is concerned, her father’s word is law. He (Minor Watson) is a judge, and a very pompous one, to whom his exasperated son-in-law owes his career to date.
In the initial encounter between Cleve and Thelma, Barbara Stanwyck is immediately convincing as a woman with plenty to hide – and immediately compelling because this comes through in circumstances that seem to place Thelma Jordon in a thoroughly respectable light. When her aunt (Gertrude Hoffman) is shot dead and Thelma goes to pieces at the scene of the crime, Stanwyck’s impassioned, beseeching behaviour seems, at the time, a little automatic. Perhaps she was able to play this role almost too easily (according to Robert Siodmak, she felt she needed no advice from him). Yet, by the end of the film, the inauthentic quality in Thelma’s panic makes complete sense. Stanwyck is especially brilliant keeping things to herself when Thelma is arrested for the aunt’s murder and is questioned by her defence lawyer – although he (enjoyably played by Stanley Ridges) is canny enough to work out what’s going on. Richard Rober is Tony Laredo, a jewel thief who was Thelma’s partner in crime and bed before she met Cleve Marshall. Rober isn’t as dangerously entertaining as either his character’s name or profession suggests he should be. One element of the mystery that remained unsolved (as far as I could see) was what happened to the large dog that sits very conspicuously in the passenger seat of Thelma’s car in an early scene but never appears again.
25 May 2015
