“The film is seldom screened, and any chance to see it should not be missed.” David Cairns, Senses of Cinema

As an appropriate kick-off to our series, the Southern Gothic fiction tradition fittingly informs this tale of a writer, played to smarmy perfection by Louis Hayward, whose move on the hired help ends in her unfortunate demise, and a grisly cover-up attempt. Within the confines of a cavernous Republic Pictures soundstage, Lang, like Orson Welles before him with Macbeth, takes full advantage of its artificiality in creating a claustrophobic setting in which the act-an accidental murder, in this case-informs the art, and vice versa, with mise-en-scène sometimes curiously reminiscent of Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter which would follow eight years later. Gorgeous cinematography by Edward Cronjager in a deep-black mode cements the film as key in the film noir canon, and the scenario's deliberate artificiality presages later Lang such as Beyond a Reasonable Doubt.