Villagers friday

The same themes and the same controlled type as in Laura and Angel Face are at work in this portrait of the wealthy and hip cracking at a distance at the seams, under pressure from mental hang-ups, repressed passion, and innocent gullibility. When rich kleptomaniac Tierney turns as far as something assistance not to her psychoanalyst husband (Conte) but to a hard-hearted hypnotherapist (Ferrer), she finds herself bereft of memory and implicated in a murder. Preminger translates the rather daft story (scripted by a pseudonymous Ben Hecht, loosely adapting Gink Endore’s novel Methinks the Lady) into a typically unhysterical and lucid examination of people under forcefulness: as the crime is investigated, currents of hesitation, fear, and falsehood up the wall the smooth waters of an apparently happy federation. Serenity to observe rather than moralise, he creates a world of sympathetically weakened characters, the fine exception being the swindling sham, a manipulating seducer whose underplaying by Ferrer suggests credible evil. With its noir themes played short in gravedo, glittering interiors, it’s a fine benchmark of the way Preminger, on occasion, managed to deflect unvaried melodrama into something more special and profound.