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Undercurrent starts with normality, suburbia in the snow, the very surface that film noir was about to break, when 1946 spilled into the century and sped the future on with its weirdismal messaging about the martyrdom and murderdoom of wifely women.
Real life was being broken, it was false to begin with and about to get a whole lot worse. The echoes of every day womanhood are found in the strange and innocent confident and smart personage of Katharine Hepburn, not noir's greatest star, by far.
Undercurrent (1946) is the American gothic of marriage, and so observe the large house, here indeed large houses, and the unanswered questions that always lurk, the primary question being is my husband going to kill me?
MGM’s Undercurrent, directed by Vincente Minnelli and released in 1946, might be most accurately understood not as a straightforward suspense melodrama, but as an atmospheric warning disguised in silk and piano music.
It is an artefact of peculiar contradictions: a woman’s picture that masquerades as a mystery, a gothic tale of paranoia dressed in the trappings of high society, a noir without streets, cigarettes, or crime — and yet unmistakably of the noir tradition.
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At its middling point of human maturity and innocence is Katharine Hepburn, stripped of her usual fast-talking bravado, asked instead to exhibit fear, uncertainty, doubt, and the frail trembling of a woman beginning to suspect her husband might kill her.
This is a film about secrets, about the savagery that can live under the sheen of elegance, about power dressed in a tuxedo — and about the distinctly post-war idea that menace might now reside not in alleys or underworlds, but in marriage.
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The plot of Undercurrent is deceptively basic. Hepburn plays Ann Hamilton, a chemist’s daughter, thirty-nine, unmarried, intellectually bright, emotionally naïve. Her life, in its cloistered way, is content: she assists her father (a gentle and bemused Edmund Gwenn) with his work, is cared for by the wisecracking housekeeper (Marjorie Main), and has learned to sublimate her desires within the confines of familial duty. Into this circumscribed domesticity enters Alan Garroway (Robert Taylor), an industrial chemist and postwar millionaire.
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He is all surface: charming, handsome, rich, attentive. Ann, seduced by his suavity, marries him with astonishing speed. Soon after, as he whisks her into a world of Washington cocktail parties, elegant stables in Virginia, and a modernist seaside retreat, she begins to hear whispers of a missing brother — Michael Garroway — who once co-owned the family business and has since vanished.
What exactly is presented by the science scenes with the chemical reaction of love chats, are they just a naff forty minute novelistic turn while we wait for the bruising darkness of film noir to emerge and entertain us the best? She is some kind of difficult brain, or is it all about a couple of novelistic momentitos?
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| Bookshops in film noir — avec Undercurrent (1946) |
The more she hears, the more she suspects murder. Eventually, Ann finds herself not merely married but endangered. And it is in this unmasking — of Alan, of marriage, of herself — that the film stakes its claim.
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Set against the moment of 1946 — the first full year of global “peace” after the catastrophic upheavals of World War II — the film is marked by that era’s anxiety. Men were returning from war with haunted eyes and altered personalities; women were being urged to relinquish their wartime autonomy and retreat into domesticity.
This tension runs through Undercurrent like the titular metaphor: the calm surface of a perfect husband, a perfect marriage, and a perfect postwar life conceals a darker psychological drift. Hepburn’s Ann is the embodiment of the returning woman — educated, independent, essential during the war — now subtly instructed to disappear inside a husband’s ambitions.
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| Leigh Whipper in Undercurrent (1946) |
Taylor, freshly back from military service, takes an intriguing step here: his Alan is neither outright villain nor simplistic cad. Rather, he is a charming sociopath in the key of dapper decorum. This is a man who has erased his own brother from his life, redacted photographs, changed details, forbidden conversation.
He is possessive, and his love is a kind of ownership. What makes Taylor’s performance so compelling — and so disturbing — is its restraint. He smiles too much, touches his wife a little too delicately, pauses half a beat too long. His Alan is the mid-century version of gaslight: not a brute, but a manipulator, one who bends reality gently until the woman in his orbit doubts her own memory.
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One might argue that Hepburn’s casting here is odd — even perverse. She was, by 1946, a symbol of independence, of Yankee defiance, of intellectual parity with men. To see her pleading with a husband, unraveling under his gaze, being undone by her own suspicions, feels jarring. But that very dislocation is what makes the film hum.
Hepburn does not “play Hepburn.” She plays uncertainty. She plays a woman taught to trust male power, then left to endure the consequences. It is a performance full of restraint and calculation, and nowhere more evident than in a key fitting-room scene, where she stares at herself in the mirror, resplendent in satin, and asks aloud whether anyone could ever find her beautiful. It is not a narcissistic line. It is the line of a woman who has been loved for her usefulness, not her self.
The film reaches toward noir, though it never quite descends into its full embrace. There are no gangsters, no detectives, no cynical voiceovers. But noir is not merely genre — it is atmosphere, worldview, geometry.
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And Undercurrent has atmosphere from time to time, it is the stuff of the cinematic wash, always something to kind of see, never much cause to look away, although we have been here for a long time now.
The film in this wise mode is about the slow disintegration of certainty, about a woman caught in a trap she did not see being set. It is a story of obsession and concealment. And though the cinematography (by Karl Freund) is not as chiaroscuro as one might wish, Minnelli composes the frames with the same eye for claustrophobic opulence that he later brought to Madame Bovary.
Shadows stretch behind curtains. Hallways elongate. Doors are overheard, not opened. And Taylor’s final collapse — death by horse, or perhaps death by exposure — is less a climax than a resolution: the revelation of something that had always been visible to anyone willing to look.
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He redesigns her social behavior. He controls her speech, her curiosities, her friendships. The entire film is predicated on Ann’s desire to know — and Alan’s violence at being known. The scenes of psychological terror — notably those in which Alan accuses her of fantasizing about his brother, or interrogates her casually about her day — are precise studies in patriarchal control.
Ann’s isolation, once removed from her father and housekeeper, is total. The film does not present her as foolish, but it does illustrate the costs of being female in a world where love can so easily transform into surveillance. That she survives is a victory; that she must survive alone is the price of having seen the truth.
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Robert Mitchum, who plays Michael, is more symbol than character. He haunts the first hour of the film as an absence — and when he does appear, he is soft-spoken, gentle, a man marked by sorrow. Mitchum, on the cusp of his breakthrough in Out of the Past (1947), is not yet the mythic figure he would become.
He does not sneer. He murmurs. He listens. He carries in his body a moral contrast to Alan’s rigidity. It is no accident that he lives by the sea — a motif that recurs often in 1940s films as the site of truth, danger, revelation. Mitchum’s brief presence reorients the narrative. He is not the hero, but he is the conscience.
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Jayne Meadows, in a minor but electric role, brings another kind of energy. As Sylvia Burton, an old flame of Alan’s, she is the only character who speaks in riddles and silences. She knows things. Her languorous glances and clipped dialogue are reminders of a world outside Alan’s narrative. She, too, is a woman who saw something once — and lived.
Ya now this must be torn from our minds, ya it must be torn out and looked at from the side, all of Undercurrent, the worst is to see it from the side, because then you will see that Undercurrent belongs to a very specific moment: the beginning of the Cold War, the reintegration of returning soldiers into civilian life, and the re-domestication of women who had worked in factories and labs during the war.
The film’s underlying theme — that something is deeply wrong in the supposed order of things — maps neatly onto the cultural anxieties of the time. Alan Garroway’s wealth, derived from wartime invention, makes him a kind of prototype of the military-industrial complex. His chemical breakthroughs, his corporate consolidation, and his obsessive secrecy all echo a nation suddenly aware that knowledge and destruction now go hand in hand.
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The paranoia of the plot — who knows what, who can be trusted — mirrors the broader national mood of distrust. The idea that danger might wear a tuxedo and carry roses was, in 1946, newly plausible.
Minnelli, better known for color and music, takes to this material with an unusual gravity. The visual world he builds is all satin and marble, but there is menace in every mirror. Ann’s descent from luminous bride to terrified fugitive is not filmed with hysteria but with delicacy. Minnelli’s gift is tone — and he uses it here to tremendous effect.
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Undercurrent also deserves note for its place in the history of American film. It is perhaps the only true film noir in Hepburn’s filmography, and a rare non-musical for Minnelli. For Robert Taylor, it marks a turning point — away from his prewar reputation as a romantic lead, toward more morally ambiguous roles like Conspirator (1949).
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Mitchum, of course, would go on to become the face of noir cynicism, the man who always knew the score and never expected a happy ending. Here, in his embryonic form, he is a soft-spoken ghost of a man, offering Hepburn not romance, but refuge.
It's still 37 minutes in before the music turns dramatic and the close ups go into full with minor notes reaching evil tension or its suggestion. What is wrong in this marriage? Massive wealth as is wrong with much marital gothic film noir.
But beyond its casting anomalies, Undercurrent serves as a quiet critique of postwar American optimism. It suggests that wealth can conceal rot, that love can become a form of control, and that the most dangerous lies are the ones we tell to the people we most want to impress.
In an era when American cinema was beginning to embrace Technicolor fantasies and escapist spectacles, Undercurrent dares to ask whether our most cherished institutions — marriage, business, family — might themselves be structured by violence. It is not, finally, about a villain. It is about a system.
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That the film never achieved the fame of its contemporaries — Laura, Rebecca, Gaslight — is less a failure than an indication of its oddity. It does not resolve easily. It lacks a memorable villain, or a femme fatale. It ends, not in triumph, but in muted possibility.
The fantasy is not restored. The husband is dead. The brother is too haunted to offer love. The heroine is free, yes, but she is also alone, and changed. If it were truly an MGM picture in full, she would find happiness again, swiftly. But this is a noir. And in noir, the best one can hope for is survival. The lobbies remained shut all night and morning, but then came the following powerful messages:
An Irresistible Force That Draws a Man and Woman Together!
Please Don't Tell The Terrific Ending!
Between Their Kisses and Fondest Embraces Comes a Nameless TERROR!
NEVER BEFORE...HAS THE SCREEN MASTERED SUCH MAGNIFICENT DRAMA!
LOVE has the quality of blindness...so has HATE!
LOVERS...HUNTED BY A MAD SUSICION THAT TURNS INTO TERROR
AN UNUSAL STORY - THE WORLD ACCLAIMED HIM A GENIUS...BUT HIS WIFE KNEW HIM FOR WHAT HE WAS!
Katherine Hepburn (Never so exciting!) Robert Taylor (He's back! And it's his greatest role!)
Beneath the surface of an overpowering love may surge an undercurrent of vicious hate!
It is fitting that the film opens and closes with music — Brahms, rendered with aching restraint. This is a film about surfaces: beautiful, civilized, composed. And it is about what lies beneath: terror, envy, shame, and a love so possessive it becomes indistinguishable from hatred.
Hepburn, the eternal New England Amazon, is here reduced, humbled, then revived. That she does not emerge triumphant is not the film’s failure. It is its truth. She learns what many American women learned in 1946 — that the war may be over, but the danger has only begun.
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| Smokin' cigarillo and carton clues with paranoid wife Katharine Hepburn in Undercurrent (1946) |
Ya, ya I still say it every time I see this movie, which is every year on October the 20th: Vincente Minnelli's Undercurrent (1946) offers a peculiar fusion of psychological tension, gothic romance, and the noir aesthetic, all enveloped in the genteel trappings of postwar American respectability.
At once lyrical and unnerving, the film oscillates between refined domesticity and the shadowy threat of concealed violence. Though its mystery plot contains implausibilities, such as the prolonged absence of law enforcement amid profound personal calamities, these lapses must be understood as intentional devices of a stylized psychological world. Minnelli, ever the modernist dramatist, sculpts atmosphere and character over procedural logic.
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The narrative concerns itself with the marriage of Ann Hamilton (Katharine Hepburn), the daughter of a revered scientist, to Alan Garroway (Robert Taylor), a magnetic and wealthy industrialist with a past he is reluctant to discuss.
The marriage unfolds, can a marriage be said to unfold, I think it is a funny image, unfolding, as in a sheet, not a story, not a film noir story, that could never unfold as this one does with suddenness, and the secrecy that engulfs Alan's brother, Michael (Robert Mitchum), rapidly emerges as the principal dramatic and emotional axis of the film. The lingering mystery of Michael's disappearance, and Alan's dread of what truths might emerge, pull Ann into a labyrinth of suspicion, fear, and slow awakening.
As with Minnelli's later works such as Home from the Hill (1960), Undercurrent meditates on the bifurcated nature of American masculinity. Two brothers raised under similar conditions diverge drastically in moral and emotional temperament.
The film stages their conflict with the elegance of classical tragedy and the kinetic thrust of popular melodrama. Mitchum's elusive presence, so central to the emotional undercurrents of the film, echoes his persona in later noir staples like Out of the Past (1947). Taylor, conversely, performs a tightly coiled rendition of patriarchal entitlement, cloaked in cultivated charm and material splendour, and splendor.
The film, though set in the capital of American power, abstains from any overt political commentary. This silence is not neutral; it echoes the conservative tonal shift in the immediate postwar years. The war had ended only a year before the film's release, and the United States in 1946 was already displaying signs of unease with the progressive coalitions that had won the war.
The looming Red Scare and a retrenchment of traditional gender roles began to shape the ideological climate. Minnelli, who crafts his mise-en-scène with the precision of a watchmaker, offers no direct critique but registers anxiety through symbols, staging, and the very architecture of the domestic spaces.
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The film's domestic interiors are baroque, suffused with vertical lines, layered lighting, and mirrored surfaces. Candles, pillars, and angular doorways frame conversations with rigid geometry. In contrast to noir's usual urban grit, Minnelli fashions an expressionist topography of Southern estates and technocratic laboratories.
This play of space and form becomes especially resonant in scenes involving Robert Mitchum, whose every appearance is staged with almost architectural anticipation. When he finally enters the stable scene, the camera glides past a pillar to reveal him – a Minnellian hallmark of spatial unveiling.
Undercurrent also occupies a unique position in the genealogy of American cinema as a transitional work. It balances the dreamlike visual style of Minnelli with themes more familiar from the hard-edged tradition of noir. The use of mirrors, the motif of disappearance, and the thematic emphasis on identity dissolution all situate the film within the noir tradition.
Yet unlike the fatalistic worlds of Double Indemnity (1944) or The Killers (1946), Minnelli allows for possibility, for metamorphosis. His characters may be anguished, but they are not irrevocably doomed.
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| Katharine Hepburn in Undercurrent (1946) |
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| Robert Mitchum in Undercurrent (1946) |
Much of this amazingly described, here I describe it, this film’s potency derives from its portrayal of female subjectivity. Ann, played with trembling severity by Hepburn, undergoes a visual and psychological transformation under the influence of her husband. Initially styled as an androgynous intellectual, she is reshaped into a glamorous trophy by Taylor’s character, who exerts control not merely over her wardrobe but over her inner world.
The makeover is not one of liberation but of containment, symbolizing the postwar drive to refeminize women after their wartime roles. The film inscribes this transformation as a form of violence. Hepburn’s eventual rebellion, subtle though it is, signals the reassertion of self amidst oppressive structures.
The trauma she experiences is not hysterical but rational, a logical reaction to the creeping awareness of male duplicity and social expectation.
The society into which Ann is introduced – a rarefied Washington elite – is portrayed with arch detachment. The dialogue at the post-wedding party brims with coded references and the kind of name-dropping that Minnelli would later satirize outright in Bells Are Ringing (1960).
These social scenes are constructed not merely to alienate Ann, but to articulate the falseness of the world she is marrying into. Like Gregory Peck in Designing Woman (1957), she is an intruder into another's milieu, though with far greater emotional stakes. The film is thus not just about personal awakening but about the barriers erected by class and culture.
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Technology plays an ambivalent role throughout the film. Alan is not merely a businessman; he is a man of science and innovation. His technological advancements, specifically in long-distance control systems, symbolize power that is abstract, dehumanized, and distant.
The contrast between Alan’s world of gadgets and Ann’s father’s old-school chemical tinkering underscores a tension between humanism and mechanization. This anxiety resonates with the immediate postwar period, in which the atomic bomb and industrial warfare had left indelible marks on the American psyche. Minnelli, never one for overt symbolism, uses bubbles in a glass tube and radio monitors as quiet emblems of a world increasingly shaped by unseen forces.
Yet it is not only the technological that is uncanny; the spatial is as well. Minnelli’s signature motifs – octagonal tables, spherical decor, vertical pillars, mirrored surfaces – recur in uncanny combinations. The absence of family photographs, particularly at Alan’s home, renders his world a shrine to forgetfulness.
In many many Minnelli many Minnelli-nelly films, photographic memory is a tool of continuity and legacy. Here its absence becomes a vacuum of identity. Alan is not merely secretive; he is a man who has annihilated his past.
This annihilation links Undercurrent to the noir tradition, where protagonists often flee from prior selves. Taylor's character is a study in performative identity, having undergone a transformation just before the film begins. Such fluidity of selfhood is rare for male leads in mid-century melodrama but endemic to Minnelli's world, where roles and appearances are slippery and performative.
The hero-heel in The Bad and the Beautiful, the split man in Some Came Running, and the masquerading rogue in The Pirate all partake of the same malleability.
Time in Undercurrent unfurls not as continuity but as expansion. The plot spans years, accommodating the slow emergence of truths and the painful evolution of characters. This is a drama not of a single crisis but of cumulative disillusionment. Minnelli, like Henry James before him, is fascinated by the long arc of perception. Ann does not understand her situation in a flash; her knowledge accrues, haltingly, through observation, suspicion, and confrontation.
The theme of blending into a social group is essential to Minnelli's cinema. In Undercurrent, it is dramatized with painful precision. Ann fails to comprehend the language and codes of her husband's elite circle.
Her humiliation is visual, sartorial, and spatial. She wears the wrong dress, cannot navigate the conversation, and finds herself exiled within her own home. Modern audiences may find this concern with social blending outdated, but Minnelli illuminates the violence of conformity. The pressure to belong is not benign; it deforms.
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| Lousy husband and paranoid woman with Katharine Hepburn and Robert Taylor in Undercurrent (1946) |
Class markers pervade the film, from Taylor's aggressively upper-class wardrobe to the best pinstripe suit worn by a secondary character. Clothes are not mere decoration in Minnelli; they speak. Mitchum's leather jacket, youthful and working-class, hints at a more honest masculinity than Taylor's gleaming suits.
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The visual coding is precise. Brown garments, often associated with villainy in Minnelli's color grammar, here make Hepburn appear merely naive and misaligned.
One of the film's most delicate sequences involves the kinetic art of shadows and swinging lights. In the stable confrontation, a lamp swings rhythmically, casting moving shadows across Mitchum and Taylor. This marriage of kinetic and light art suggests not only the instability of perception but the ceaseless motion of emotional and moral ambiguity.
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The waterfall, too, functions as kinetic art, its ceaseless motion echoing the unrest beneath the calm surfaces of domestic life.
The film's final act takes on a suspenseful tone reminiscent of Hitchcock. A climactic journey along a mountainous path threatens a fall into the abyss, both literal and symbolic. The scene is echoed years later in Minnelli's The Long, Long Trailer (1954), where a similar precipice heightens domestic farce into existential dread. The presence of engineers in both films suggests a gendered belief in rational control, yet in each case, nature and psychology resist domination.
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Undercurrent emerges as a film that critiques without announcing its critique. Its subtle commentary on masculinity, conformity, memory, and perception accrues not through dialogue but through mise-en-scène and performance.
Hepburn and Taylor embody the contradictions of a nation trying to return to normalcy while suppressing the traumas and transformations of war. The film's real subject is not mystery but metamorphosis. Its achievement lies not in what it solves, but in what it suggests: that identity, like light through a swinging lamp, is ever in motion.
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In the broader canvas of American history, Undercurrent belongs to a moment when the country, victorious yet fractured, sought stability through domestic reinvention. But Minnelli refuses the easy comfort of that narrative. He discloses, through cinema's most refined means, the vertigo of that postwar transformation. He makes visible what the era could not confess. Undercurrent may not be among his most celebrated films, but it remains one of his most essential.
Vincente Minnelli was an American director famed for films packed with art, artists, and high culture—always trying to elevate mass audiences. In Undercurrent (1946), his love for art and poetic sensibilities shine through in the heroine’s affinity for poetry, resonating with his broader theme of sensitive artists.
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Mark Griffin, author of A Hundred or More Hidden Things: The Life and Films of Vincente Minnelli, vividly explores Minnelli’s early stage roots—a must-read for Minnelli enthusiasts. Like the heroine in Undercurrent, Minnelli's characters often navigate fraught social landscapes, caught between societal expectations and inner turmoil.
Stephen Harvey’s Directed by Vincente Minnelli (1989) documents the behind-the-scenes artistry Minnelli infused into every film. The visual motifs and meticulous staging Harvey praises appear consistently in Undercurrent, notably in tense scenes underscored by technological innovation—characters wrestling with long-distance communications and elaborate inventions.
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Minnelli’s obsession with artists is evident across his oeuvering big oeuvre: jazz in I Dood It, ballet in An American in Paris, Van Gogh in Lust for Life. In Undercurrent, this takes the shape of quiet creative expressions: characters subtly wield guitars, paralleling gentle young men in other films who surprise with poetic depth.
Social tensions simmer beneath many Minnelli films. In Undercurrent, group dynamics are tense, highlighting gender and societal expectations. Minnelli repeatedly shows affluent, oppressive environments—as in The Bad and the Beautiful and The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—mirroring the troubling social dynamics in Undercurrent.
You know that in real life, we never witness murders. On screen we 'witness' them the whole time, it gives us that 'moral feel'. In real life nobody sees the woman being murdered, nobody saves her and nobody prosecutes the man.
Technological fascination appears again and again: engineers and inventions dominate in Undercurrent as they do in Meet Me in St. Louis. Minnelli’s narrative style often incorporates small mysteries—like the enigmatic identities in The Pirate or Designing Woman. Undercurrent amplifies this to full mystery-thriller status.
Minnelli frequently portrayed gender struggles. Like Katharine Hepburn in Undercurrent, his characters navigate patriarchal expectations, often challenging them. His films repeatedly feature feminists battling oppressive norms, seen vividly in The Sandpiper.
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Minnelli's rich visual style, beloved by critics like Andrew Sarris, creates dream-like worlds. Undercurrent encapsulates this, melding suspenseful realism with touches of surreal, evocative imagery. The film's climactic horseback chase on dangerous mountain paths exemplifies Minnelli’s kinetic approach to suspense.
Minnelli loved France as an artistic haven—clear in An American in Paris and Lust for Life. Although Undercurrent is distinctly American, the refined, elegant visual sensibilities hint at this Francophile aesthetic.
Now it can be seen, with time, through time, as a product of time, Vincent Minnelli’s artistry, showcased vividly in Undercurrent, consistently explores tensions between art and society, technology and humanity, tradition and change—always compelling, always visually sumptuous.
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Undercurrent (1946)
Directed by Vincente Minnelli
Genres - Crime, Drama, Thriller | Sub-Genres - Film Noir | Release Date - Nov 11, 1946 | Run Time - 116 min.
IT'S ON THE ESCAPING-YOUR-PAST FILM NOIR LIST
The Woman on Pier 13 (1949), Robert Stevenson, 73 min
Successful, newly-married Brad Collins once belonged to the Communist Party of the USA, and now the Party will stop at nothing to use him.
The Red House (1947), Delmer Daves, 100 min
An old man and his sister are concealing a terrible secret from their adopted teen daughter, concerning a hidden abandoned farmhouse, located deep in the woods.
The Killers (1946), Robert Siodmak, 103 min
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Gaslight (1944), George Cukor, 114 min
Ten years after her aunt was murdered in their London home, a woman returns from Italy in the 1880s to resume residence with her new husband. His obsessive interest in the house rises from a secret that may require driving his wife insane.
Out of the Past (1947), Jacques Tourneur, 97 min
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Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950), Otto Preminger, 95 min
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The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), Lewis Milestone, 116 min
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Deception (1946), Irving Rapper, 115 min
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Act of Violence (1948), Fred Zinnemann, 82 min
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Moonrise (1948), Frank Borzage, 90 min
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The Las Vegas Story (1952), Robert Stevenson, 88 min
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Walk Softly, Stranger (1950), Robert Stevenson, 81 min
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Rebecca (1940), Alfred Hitchcock, 130 min
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Somewhere in the Night (1946), Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 110 min
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Detective Story (1951), William Wyler, 103 min
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Vertigo (1958), Alfred Hitchcock, 128 min
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The Crooked Way (1949), Robert Florey, 90 min
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F.B.I. Girl (1951), William Berke, 74 min
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Gilda (1946), Charles Vidor, 110 min
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The Blue Dahlia (1946), George Marshall, 96 min
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Confidential Report (1955), Orson Welles, 93 min
An elusive billionaire hires an American smuggler to investigate his past, leading to a dizzying descent into a cold-war European landscape.
Undercurrent (1946), Vincente Minnelli, 116 min
Hey check it all out. Hi. Middle-aged bride Ann Hamilton soon begins to suspect that her charming husband is really a psychotic who plans to murder her.
The Woman on the Beach (1947), Jean Renoir, 71 min
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Macao (1952), Josef von Sternberg, 81 min
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Party Girl (1958), Nicholas Ray, 99 min
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The Two Mrs. Carrolls (1947), Peter Godfrey, 99 min
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Ellen (1950), James V. Kern, 91 min
In flashback from a 'Rebecca'-style beginning: Ellen Foster, visiting her aunt on the California coast, meets neighbor Jeff Cohalan and his ultramodern clifftop house.
Inside Job (1946), Jean Yarbrough, 65 min
A pair of married ex-convicts trying to go straight get jobs at a department store. A gangster who knows about their past threatens to expose it unless they agree to help him rob the department store.
The Damned Don't Cry (1950), Vincent Sherman, 103 min
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House of Strangers (1949), Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 101 min
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This Woman Is Dangerous (1952), Felix E. Feist, 97 min
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Criss Cross (1949), Robert Siodmak, 84 min
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Kansas City Confidential (1952), Phil Karlson, 99 min
An ex-con trying to go straight is framed for a million dollar armored car robbery and must go to Mexico in order to unmask the real culprits.
Street of Chance (1942), Jack Hively, 74 min
After an accident, a New York man with amnesia finds out the ugly truth about his real identity and past by interacting with people who seem to know him well.
This Gun for Hire (1942), Frank Tuttle, 81 min
When assassin Philip Raven shoots a blackmailer and his beautiful female companion dead, he is paid off in marked bills by his treasonous employer who is working with foreign spies.
The Strange Mrs. Crane (1948), Sam Newfield, 62 min
Hoping to bury her criminal past, Jenny Hadley settles into a comfortable existence as Gina, the wife of the politician Clinton Crane. When her former associate Floyd Durant shows up to blackmail Gina, she has no choice but to murder him. Things take a bizarre turn when Barbara Arnold is charged with Durant's murder and Gina is selected to serve on the jury.
Touch of Evil (1958), Orson Welles, 95 min
A Mexican official and his American wife are targeted in a Texas border town by the crime family he's trying to put behind bars for drug trafficking, as his concern grows over the tactics of the local detective whose cooperation he needs.
Because of You (1952), Joseph Pevney, 95 min
A female ex-con falls in love and hesitates to reveal her past.
Second Chance (1953), Rudolph Maté, 82 min
Mobster Vic Spalato's girlfriend Claire is in hiding in Mexico and she's willing to testify for a US Senate investigation committee, if she can make it back to the US alive.
I Love Trouble (1948), S. Sylvan Simon, 93 min
P.I. Stuart Bailey is hired to investigate the past of Ralph Johnson's wife, who has gone missing. He finds that the wife left her hometown with an actor, went to college using a stolen identity, and purloined $40,000 from a nightclub.
Tarnished (1950), Harry Keller, 60 min
Bud Dolliver, a former WWII hero and an ex-convict, returns to his hometown in an effort to make a new life for himself, but even with help from cannery worker Lou Jellison he finds living down his reputation difficult. He manages to get a job at Kelsey's Boat Yard because an accident caused by Kelsey Bunker's no-good son Junior endangered Bud's life and revealed his excellent war record. He does well at the job, but Joe Pettigrew (NOT played by Gig Young), personnel manager of the cannery, is jealous of Lou's feeling for Bud. He frames Bud for a robbery committed by himself and Junior Bunker. Bud's alibi is weak because he is trying to protect Lou's reputation as on the night of the robbery they were out of the state trying to get married.
Bedelia (1946), Lance Comfort, 90 min
Bedelia, a newly remarried beautiful widow, is on honeymoon in Monte Carlo. A painter approaches her inquiring about her past. When she and her husband go back to England the artist will soon be there. Danger, crime and truth will follow.
Once a Thief (1950), W. Lee Wilder, 88 min
A down-on-her-luck San Francisco woman, turning in desperation to jewel robbery, barely escapes getting nabbed in a heist and moves to Los Angeles where she gets an honest job as a waitress. Her troubles start again, however, when she falls madly in love, blind to the fact that her boyfriend is a four-flushing, small-time con man.
Man on the Run (1949), Lawrence Huntington, 82 min
In post-war Britain, an army deserter unwittingly gets involved in murder and armed robbery and enlists the aid of a war widow to help clear his name.
No Trace (1950), John Gilling, 76 min
