A combo film, built around a cinematic trio of film noir, weepie musical, and romantic melodrama, and a romantic trio of Ida Lupino, Richard Widmark, and Cornell Wilde. The movie takes its cue from the earlier genre-blending The Man I Love with Lupino in the role of a chanteuse caught in Widmark's patented psychotic gameplaying. As a character says here, "She does more with a voice than anybody I've ever heard." But it is curious how this movie chimes in with Lupino's films as a writer/director: the love triangle, the tense passivity invoked by the central melodramatic situation, the humdrum setting (albeit an obvious studio set), and Lupino's character, uprooted, cynical, and forced into a stifling acquiescence broken only by her final, climactic actions. (Lupino even used the same name when she played a singer in her self-scripted Private Hell 36.) Her character is the source of violent tension between two men, but she is not a typical femme fatale because Lupino gives her an integrity typical of her best work as an actress. -Tom Kemper