Saw this on January 17 via T Turner Classic Movies. Part way through, I thought the view of an apartment building was too familiar. At that point, nothing in the dialogue or words was the least bit familiar. As I continued to watch, a few things seemed familiar and when I later checked IMDB, sure enough, while I had not reviewed this movie, my rating for it revealed I had seen it before-surely on TCM.
Barbara Stanwyck is Cheryl Draper, a woman in her 40s, living alone in an LA apartment building. One night she is awakened by a strong wind blowing through her window. When she goes to close it, she happens to see a violent fight in an apartment across the street. She appears to clearly see a man strangling a woman to the point of her death-or at least collapse into unconsciousness. She immediately phones the police.
We see a man-the murderer-leave his apartment, go down the hallway, and find an open door to another apartment-unoccupied. He drags a woman's body into that apartment. Movie viewers do not hear Cheryl's phone call, we just see police vehicles on the street, for several minutes, which are also observed by the man who Cheryl saw commit the murder, from his own apartment. He is seen setting up things to make it appear he has been asleep, knowing the police will be knocking any moment.
The two detectives Larry Mathews (Gary Merrill) and Eddie Vincent (Jesse White) come in, tell him what has been reported and look around. They find no evidence of a murder. Richter is a bachelor and he says he was in all evening and nobody was with him. There are two things they overlook-a torn curtain where the witness said she saw a struggle, and an earring on the floor. The killer, Albert Richter (George Sanders) sees the torn curtain while talking to the police and slyly slips over to close the curtain and pretends to tear it at that point. He doesn't pick up the earring until after they leave.
Our clever killer keeps watch after the cops leave, and from lights going off, figures exactly which of his neighbor's apartments was the location of the witness.
Because they found no evidence, the police figure Cheryl was dreaming. They more or less get her to agree that's what happened, but then see see-saws back and forth. Most of the time she insists she did see a murder, but every time the police provide anything to refute her claim, or challenge any of the "evidence" she presents to them, she says that maybe she did dream it all up.
The next morning, she happens to spot Richter getting into a station wagon after loading a large trunk into the back. Yes, the trunk was large enough to hide a body. He drives off and Cheryl, after spotting a sign saying there was an apartment for lease, goes over to see the manager, Dick Elliott-future mayor of Mayberry-and asks to see the empty apartment. The only evidence she finds are drag marks on the carpet. She says it's hard to picture it's suitability when it's all empty, so Dick suggests they see a similar apartment that is occupied-and leads her into Richter's apartment. I guess they could do things like that, but I would sure hate to think my apartment manager lets strangers come in and look around when I am away for the day.
She finds a pair of earrings on the desk in Richter's apartment and takes them. He sees they are gone right after she leaves and when she shows up at the police station, Detective Mathews has already received a phone call from Richter about someone taking those earrings. It seems they belonged to his late wife who died during the war and there is proof that he brought them over on the boat. Richter, before becoming an author and speech-maker in the U.S. was a Nazi, we learn.
Because Cheryl keeps insisting she saw a murder, Richter comes up with a clever scheme to make her look like she's mentally impaired. He is seen mailing a letter to himself. Later, he comes to her apartment. She reluctantly admits him, and he shows her this short-typewritten letter supposedly coming from her, threatening him. She denies knowing anything about it. In her presence, he crumples it and says he'll let it drop as long as she doesn't continue to harass him.
As he is leaving, he pressed one of the button on the door-the kind of door I personally have seen although they are no longer common. This button is on the side, above the latch and it takes off the automatic lock when the door is closed. He waits for her to leave the apartment, then enters through the unlocked door and sits down at her typewriter and goes to work, first re-typing the crumpled letter he showed her, then some more.
Later we see Richter at Mathews' office, complaining because he says he's now received two threatening letters from her. Cheryl is brought in and confronted with the letters AND her confiscated typewriter which is tested and shown to be the one used to type the letters. Confused, she basically admits she must have typed those notes except she doesn't remember doing so.
This leads to the strangest sequence in the movie. She is sent to a hospital for evaluation. There, she is in a ward with three other women, all of whom have huge mental issues. She starts to get herself in more trouble by trying to leave before being drugged by a nurse. Luckily Mathews is there with a writ to let her out. He has begun dating Cheryl, despite everything going on. He believes she is being truthful, but is mistaken in thinking she saw a murder.
Extra spoiler alert! Richter revisits Cheryl in her apartment to read to her another letter from her own typewriter. This one is intended to serve as her suicide note. He is on the verge of pushing her out the window when a policewoman (sent by Mathews) comes to the door. Cheryl pushes past her and dashes out. Having no clue where to go, she brushes past people on the street and races, ahead of Richter, the policewoman, and others race after her. She winds up going into a 30-story building under construction, climbs all the flights of stairs to the top level, not nearly finished, and is there confronted by Richter, who is only a bit ahead of the others. Mathews has meanwhile driven to the scene and he is the next one up the stairs. I don't think it would surprise anyone to learn that they didn't have this unfinished building set just so everyone could come down the stairs alive, nor would I truly be ruining things by saying the person who falls to their death is not the film's heroine.
Overall, I did enjoy the drama and melodrama of this movie. My complaints mostly center on Cheryl's inconsistent thinking about how to react when it appears there was no murder. As soon as she learned that they found no body, and that Richter knew she was the one who said there was one, when she met Richter, she should have said, "I apologize Mr. Richter. The police have convinced me that I must have been dreaming the whole thing and I'm going to try to forget all about it." In other words, say something to make him think he has no reason to fear you at all.
Then, if she was like Hitchcock's Cary Grant in North by Northwest, or Bob Cummings in Saboteur, she could have tried investigating things for herself without letting anyone know it, and possibly found enough evidence to take to the detectives. She didn't seem to realize that when she kept coming back to saying there was a murder without any actual evidence she was hurting her own cause.
The film would have been better I think if they hadn't strayed into two unnecessary areas. Making the villain a Nazi who expressed thoughts about how some people don't have as much right to life as others didn't do anything to help bring about his downfall. It didn't matter to our story if he killed the woman because he felt superior or if he just got mad at her that night. I'd like to say it just made him more unlikeable-but his introduction in the first five minutes was to see him strangle someone to death-how much more unlikeable do we want?
Then the unsettling look at a psych ward in a hospital in the early 50s. One woman-listed as a "Negress" in the credits-keeps singing the same song. An old woman keeps repeating one line about letting some gentleman in, almost like a dialogue line from a movie, and the third woman aside from Cheryl tries to help her, but gets violent regarding her other roommates. The nurses seem to control everything with drugs to keep everyone sedated. Bleak, depressing, and more. None of the rest of the movie had anything to do with this. It wasn't an expose on these wards, nothing was suggested to say this is wrong. We're just supposed to feel good that Cheryl's new boyfriend got her out so quickly-after just two days.
Cheryl switched back and forth enough on whether she did or didn't see a murder, whenever confronted with challenges, such as the letters, that there was plenty of reason for Mathews to suspect her sanity. I know many reviewers focus on how the film shows that a professional working woman had trouble being believed in this decade, but I think they way she so easily went back and forth on what she saw and did that she caused many of her own troubles. She should have gone along early on and quietly found proof of what she had seen before going back to the police.
I still gave it a 7, but it could have been better.
Barbara Stanwyck is Cheryl Draper, a woman in her 40s, living alone in an LA apartment building. One night she is awakened by a strong wind blowing through her window. When she goes to close it, she happens to see a violent fight in an apartment across the street. She appears to clearly see a man strangling a woman to the point of her death-or at least collapse into unconsciousness. She immediately phones the police.
We see a man-the murderer-leave his apartment, go down the hallway, and find an open door to another apartment-unoccupied. He drags a woman's body into that apartment. Movie viewers do not hear Cheryl's phone call, we just see police vehicles on the street, for several minutes, which are also observed by the man who Cheryl saw commit the murder, from his own apartment. He is seen setting up things to make it appear he has been asleep, knowing the police will be knocking any moment.
The two detectives Larry Mathews (Gary Merrill) and Eddie Vincent (Jesse White) come in, tell him what has been reported and look around. They find no evidence of a murder. Richter is a bachelor and he says he was in all evening and nobody was with him. There are two things they overlook-a torn curtain where the witness said she saw a struggle, and an earring on the floor. The killer, Albert Richter (George Sanders) sees the torn curtain while talking to the police and slyly slips over to close the curtain and pretends to tear it at that point. He doesn't pick up the earring until after they leave.
Our clever killer keeps watch after the cops leave, and from lights going off, figures exactly which of his neighbor's apartments was the location of the witness.
Because they found no evidence, the police figure Cheryl was dreaming. They more or less get her to agree that's what happened, but then see see-saws back and forth. Most of the time she insists she did see a murder, but every time the police provide anything to refute her claim, or challenge any of the "evidence" she presents to them, she says that maybe she did dream it all up.
The next morning, she happens to spot Richter getting into a station wagon after loading a large trunk into the back. Yes, the trunk was large enough to hide a body. He drives off and Cheryl, after spotting a sign saying there was an apartment for lease, goes over to see the manager, Dick Elliott-future mayor of Mayberry-and asks to see the empty apartment. The only evidence she finds are drag marks on the carpet. She says it's hard to picture it's suitability when it's all empty, so Dick suggests they see a similar apartment that is occupied-and leads her into Richter's apartment. I guess they could do things like that, but I would sure hate to think my apartment manager lets strangers come in and look around when I am away for the day.
She finds a pair of earrings on the desk in Richter's apartment and takes them. He sees they are gone right after she leaves and when she shows up at the police station, Detective Mathews has already received a phone call from Richter about someone taking those earrings. It seems they belonged to his late wife who died during the war and there is proof that he brought them over on the boat. Richter, before becoming an author and speech-maker in the U.S. was a Nazi, we learn.
Because Cheryl keeps insisting she saw a murder, Richter comes up with a clever scheme to make her look like she's mentally impaired. He is seen mailing a letter to himself. Later, he comes to her apartment. She reluctantly admits him, and he shows her this short-typewritten letter supposedly coming from her, threatening him. She denies knowing anything about it. In her presence, he crumples it and says he'll let it drop as long as she doesn't continue to harass him.
As he is leaving, he pressed one of the button on the door-the kind of door I personally have seen although they are no longer common. This button is on the side, above the latch and it takes off the automatic lock when the door is closed. He waits for her to leave the apartment, then enters through the unlocked door and sits down at her typewriter and goes to work, first re-typing the crumpled letter he showed her, then some more.
Later we see Richter at Mathews' office, complaining because he says he's now received two threatening letters from her. Cheryl is brought in and confronted with the letters AND her confiscated typewriter which is tested and shown to be the one used to type the letters. Confused, she basically admits she must have typed those notes except she doesn't remember doing so.
This leads to the strangest sequence in the movie. She is sent to a hospital for evaluation. There, she is in a ward with three other women, all of whom have huge mental issues. She starts to get herself in more trouble by trying to leave before being drugged by a nurse. Luckily Mathews is there with a writ to let her out. He has begun dating Cheryl, despite everything going on. He believes she is being truthful, but is mistaken in thinking she saw a murder.
Extra spoiler alert! Richter revisits Cheryl in her apartment to read to her another letter from her own typewriter. This one is intended to serve as her suicide note. He is on the verge of pushing her out the window when a policewoman (sent by Mathews) comes to the door. Cheryl pushes past her and dashes out. Having no clue where to go, she brushes past people on the street and races, ahead of Richter, the policewoman, and others race after her. She winds up going into a 30-story building under construction, climbs all the flights of stairs to the top level, not nearly finished, and is there confronted by Richter, who is only a bit ahead of the others. Mathews has meanwhile driven to the scene and he is the next one up the stairs. I don't think it would surprise anyone to learn that they didn't have this unfinished building set just so everyone could come down the stairs alive, nor would I truly be ruining things by saying the person who falls to their death is not the film's heroine.
Overall, I did enjoy the drama and melodrama of this movie. My complaints mostly center on Cheryl's inconsistent thinking about how to react when it appears there was no murder. As soon as she learned that they found no body, and that Richter knew she was the one who said there was one, when she met Richter, she should have said, "I apologize Mr. Richter. The police have convinced me that I must have been dreaming the whole thing and I'm going to try to forget all about it." In other words, say something to make him think he has no reason to fear you at all.
Then, if she was like Hitchcock's Cary Grant in North by Northwest, or Bob Cummings in Saboteur, she could have tried investigating things for herself without letting anyone know it, and possibly found enough evidence to take to the detectives. She didn't seem to realize that when she kept coming back to saying there was a murder without any actual evidence she was hurting her own cause.
The film would have been better I think if they hadn't strayed into two unnecessary areas. Making the villain a Nazi who expressed thoughts about how some people don't have as much right to life as others didn't do anything to help bring about his downfall. It didn't matter to our story if he killed the woman because he felt superior or if he just got mad at her that night. I'd like to say it just made him more unlikeable-but his introduction in the first five minutes was to see him strangle someone to death-how much more unlikeable do we want?
Then the unsettling look at a psych ward in a hospital in the early 50s. One woman-listed as a "Negress" in the credits-keeps singing the same song. An old woman keeps repeating one line about letting some gentleman in, almost like a dialogue line from a movie, and the third woman aside from Cheryl tries to help her, but gets violent regarding her other roommates. The nurses seem to control everything with drugs to keep everyone sedated. Bleak, depressing, and more. None of the rest of the movie had anything to do with this. It wasn't an expose on these wards, nothing was suggested to say this is wrong. We're just supposed to feel good that Cheryl's new boyfriend got her out so quickly-after just two days.
Cheryl switched back and forth enough on whether she did or didn't see a murder, whenever confronted with challenges, such as the letters, that there was plenty of reason for Mathews to suspect her sanity. I know many reviewers focus on how the film shows that a professional working woman had trouble being believed in this decade, but I think they way she so easily went back and forth on what she saw and did that she caused many of her own troubles. She should have gone along early on and quietly found proof of what she had seen before going back to the police.
I still gave it a 7, but it could have been better.