Deanna Durbin and Gene Kelly are marvelously, eerily cast against type in this Siodmak film noir loosely based on a Somerset Maugham novel. In rainy New Orleans, a soldier on Christmas holiday invites a beguiling chanteuse (Durbin) to attend midnight mass. She enters into a litany of her own, telling him, in true film-noir flashback style, of her marriage to a New Orleans gentleman (Kelly) whose violent nature came to light only after the wedding. Even then, she was slow to realize that he and his mother (Gale Sondergaard) had conspired to conceal a murder. The film slips back into the present just as Kelly slips out of jail... Siodmak, whose roots are in German Expressionism, here locates the noir ethos in the home, with implications of sordid sexuality and perverted role identities. His picture of a classic American triangle-mother, son and daughter-in-law-paints sinister mustaches on a Rockwellian family portrait. Yes, Deanna, "Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year."