“Phantom Lady” is a mystery movie about a New York engineer, Alan Curtis, who is convicted of strangling his wife, Marcella, to death but is saved from the chair by his secretary, Ella Raines, who at the last minute finds the real murderer. This is a likable thriller that works much harder than most modern movies to turn up some actual life in actual settings, and to project the psychological states of both its people and its events in a genuine movie way. As a mystery it leaves you with more riddles than it solves: for instance, the murderer seems to have been in two places at the time of the crime, the hero was convicted, first degree and all, though he was witnessed everywhere but at the scene of the crime—nor is the case history of the phantom lady cleared up by your finding her at the end of the picture in her home on Long Island under the care of a psychiatrist. Being generally unhampered by circumstantial evidence, the picture is able to construct a convenient movie chain of events, such as a jam session, a seduction scene in a hotel room and the trailing of a barkeep home from work. Simply by trying to show the main visual facts of these events, the film achieves a certain degree of lust and frenzy on the part of the jazz drummer, of discomfiture on the part of Miss Raines, who has to endure his advances, and the clammy fear of the barkeep. The producers, for once, were interested in the psychological tone of each event and as a result they got hysteria out of the jazz bit, a stalking quality into the trailing episode, and lust in the seduction. Despite all this, which is likable, and despite the realism of the decor and photography, the scenes for one reason or another seem contrived, not going deeply or exactly enough into their realism, winding off to keep on the right side of the Hays Office, or being stiffened by the ham nature of the casting, acting and dialogue. Everything might have been better had the actors been closer in looks to New York bars and theatres than they are to their Hollywood studios, or had their playing been less stereotyped. Its chief attribute is that where it has had an incident to project, it has actively entered the event and tried to get over to the audience the heart of the moment instead of relaxing into the lazy evasiveness that bogs down most movies.
Some of the important features of “Jane Eyre” are that it tries for a gloomy, passionate spirit, which it achieves in only the secondary effects of the film; that, though it threatens time and again to pursue some one of its events into the depth, subtlety and significance that are demanded by each event, it never actually does, and remains a meager, chaotic résumé of itself; that it has had the common movie difficulty of transcribing the events of a novel with equal significance into the time limit of a movie. Little occurs in “Jane Eyre” beyond two barely adequate conversations between Jane and Mr. Rochester and abrupt, hectic and invariably second-hand allusions to events—nor are these allusions made better by doing them so brown in painting-like compositions which achieve a pretty obviousness inappropriate to the stark emotional moods they are intended to present.
Jane Eyre herself in movie language is confined in characterization to that uptilted head and that heartsore expression that are becoming Joan Fontaine’s trademark. She is glimpsed so whenever the directors can find a place for her in such a complexity of material and only two hours to present it all—usually in or around Orson Welles’s blanketing performance of Rochester. That performance presents Rochester in three versions, one given by Welles’s toasty-crackle voice, the second by his face, and the third by his second face, which is composed of make-up and the shadows of photographer George Barnes. Charlotte Bronte’s or the adapters’ words are never so important as Mr. Welles’s voice, and the character of Rochester is what you can piece together out of the indications of humanity washing around in the flood of his unregulated and unbashful talent. Along with his two faces and Joan Fontaine’s one, the real visual matter of the film consists in a pot-pourri of gloomy paraphernalia—scenes on the moors and inside Thornfield, sudden moans, screams and candles coming out of the blackness, music full of foreboding, and every minute or so a lonely carriage and four traversing the moor. All of these Gothic splashes hint of things that never quite materialize, including your interest.
March 13, 1944