This is a tense and ingeniously plotted noir film, based on a clever novel by Hugh Wheeler (writing as Patrick Quentin), and excellently scripted by Nunnally Johnson, who also directed. There is no way you can work out what happened until the end of the film, so don't even try. It is disappointing that the alluring Gene Tierney does not have a more interesting part and is more or less limited to being 'the wife', while her husband Van Heflin does all the acting. Ginger Rogers does a broad-stroke interpretation of a broad-stroke character, George Raft is stolid as a policeman, though it is only a supporting role despite his star billing. There are some splendid supporting performances: Virginia Leith, with a voice just like that of today's Selma Blair, was intriguing and had such promise, but never got the parts to show what she could have done in her career. Reginald Gardner is superb as Ginger Rogers's 'kept husband'. Peggy Ann Garner plays a scheming young girl (though she is 22 playing 20, she seems too old for the part, and is strangely frumpy and dull) who wheedles her way unscrupulously into affluent company with a pretence of innocence. Van Heflin is strong and forceful in his increasingly desperate role. This is an excellent fifties noir, made in colour, and Ginger Rogers's outfits are something else, and those hats! There is no undertone of despair as there is in so many forties noirs, there is instead the whiff of corrupt wealth and fame, which was so fifties. (There's no corruption now, is there?) This has something of the stage about it, being perhaps over-constructed, but it is damned complicated and keeps you guessing until the last scenes.
Review of Black Widow
