Film Noir 2019
Screening Dates
  • August 13, 2019 6:30
  • August 14, 2019 8:45
New Restoration

“Movingly illuminating … The three lead performances are terrific.”

Tom Milne, Time Out

Ida Lupino’s follow-up to her noir landmark The Hitch-Hiker (the first film noir directed by a woman) was this haunting hybrid of noir and melodrama. Noir staple Edmund O’Brien (also in The Hitch-Hiker) is Harry, a travelling salesman secretly married to two women: refined, business-smart Eve, played by Hitchcock star Joan Fontaine (Rebecca, Suspicion), and tough-talking waitress Phyllis, played by Lupino herself. The film made Lupino the first woman to direct herself in a major sound-era feature. The sensitive handling of controversial subject matter and remarkable sympathy for all characters—deeply flawed men included!—are typical of Lupino’s distinctive, too-few movies.

“Fascinating … Lupino’s film reveals and recasts film noir as male melodrama par excellence.”

British Film Institute