William Irish-Cornell Woolrich's alias-crammed his pulp mystery with compulsive and revealing detail. For the film version, director Robert Siodmak dumped the detail, instead slathering on a homegrown aesthetic lifted from German Expressionist cinema. Siodmak's lavishly sinister setting is bathed in inky shadow that conceals a menace just waiting to emerge. And emerge it does when Scott Henderson (Alan Curtis) returns from a night on the town to find his wife strangled with his own tie. Natch, he's got an alibi: an anonymous dame with a profusely plumed hat. Only the “phantom lady” seems ever more an apparition as clues to her whereabouts lead nowhere. Henderson's loyal assistant Kansas, freshly portrayed by Ella Raines, takes up the hunt, furthered by a skeptical flatfoot (Thomas Gomez). Not unexpectedly, it's Woolrich's unhinged artists-Franchot Tone's snooty sculptor and Elisha Cook's depraved drummer-who act as carriers of the chaos. This ur-noir suggests that a second, libidinous world lurks behind the first.