Ella Raines and Robert Siodmak spent four movies bending the dreamy parameters of noir

Director Robert Siodmak and actress Ella Raines both had a hell of a busy 1944, even by workhorse studio-system standards. Raines, a striking, slightly opaque beauty who had made her movie debut just a year earlier, appeared in five features, including the Preston Sturges classic-in-waiting Hail The Conquering Hero and the John Wayne vehicle Tall In The Saddle, for which she was billed above the title alongside Wayne. She also starred in two of the four movies Siodmak put out that year, following his 1943 franchise entry Son Of Dracula, which kicked off a multi-year contract with Universal Pictures. The noir Phantom Lady and the noir-adjacent The Suspect, both starring Raines, were followed by two more Siodmak/Raines movies over the next few years, and plenty more noir and noir-adjacent projects for both of them. Just a decade later, neither of them were really working in Hollywood movies anymore. It was as if they could no longer thrive in a Hollywood with less frequent black-and-white cinematography, expanded runtimes, and fewer noirish shadows.

Though their period of mutual productivity did see the fashionable emergence and recession of film noir, neither Robert Siodmak nor Ella Raines were entirely subject to the ups and downs of a single genre. As mentioned, 1944 alone saw Raines appearing in a screwball farce and a Western; she’d go on to other comedies, dramas, and oaters in her relatively brief career. But it must have become clear on some level that noir was a particularly good fit for her. She’s not bad in other genres, yet she’s also not an obvious choice for say, the Sturges movie, where she plays Libby, the spurned ex-girlfriend of hapless discharged soldier Woodrow (Eddie Bracken). Frequent past A.V. Club contributor Mike D’Angelo likened this decision to casting “Angelina Jolie as a Drew Barrymore type,” and while I wouldn’t go that far—despite the dark and ambiguous corners of Siodmak’s movies, Raines herself doesn’t actually play a stereotypically steely dame or femme fatale for him, or in other noirs—the basic comparison makes sense. In Hail, Raines pulls focus, though not necessarily unproductively, in a recurring composition Sturges employs throughout the film: Filling the frame with faces, five or six characters crowded together at a time, often jabbering or hollering at each other. Raines doesn’t jabber or holler, and her face nonetheless draws the eye. It’s a face, and a vibe, made for mystery. She seems too sophisticated to play a supplicant love interest, yet not quite forbidding enough to scare anyone away. It only makes sense to place her into noir’s shadows, like a beacon.

Robert Siodmak, who fled the Nazis in both Germany and France before landing in Hollywood, was even more closely tied to noir, whether by artistic nature or by contractual pigeonholing. Though he’s the subject of an impending Film at Lincoln Center retrospective—”Robert Siodmak: Dark Visionary” runs from December 11 to December 19 in New York City, featuring 4K restorations of both Phantom Lady and The Suspect, among others—he was never as admired in his field as some of his peers in thriller-making (notably, of course, Alfred Hitchcock, whose 1940s pictures Shadow Of A Doubt, Spellbound, and Rope share some common ground with Siodmak’s contemporaneous work). Probably his best-loved and hardest-boiled films are The Killers (1946) and Criss Cross (1948), the latter of which Steven Soderbergh fans may recognize as the source material for his underseen heist picture The Underneath. That movie served as a kind of dry run for Soderbergh’s later, better crime movies and genre exercises, and Siodmak’s own filmography has plenty of similarly interesting in-betweeners that shift between elements of noir, mystery, proto-horror, and gothic melodrama. (For what it’s worth, Soderbergh’s upcoming ghost story Presence fits comfortably on that same spectrum.)

Ella Raines doesn’t appear in The Killers or Criss Cross; in their four-movie partnership, she and Robert Siodmak would find it hard to top their first collaboration, Phantom Lady. For that matter, Lady isn’t generally as well-known as fellow class-of-’44 noir standard-bearers Double Indemnity and The Woman In The Window, and it’s easy enough to see why: Plenty of noirs have convoluted plotting, but many of the best-known classics more or less stay within the framework of mystery and/or thrillers, never quite fully tipping over into nightmare logic. Phantom Lady’s great mystery hook, by contrast, is also circuitous and dreamlike. Following a fight with his wife, a dejected Scott Henderson (Alan Curtis) meets up with a stranger and spends the evening with her, at a bar and attending a revue. When he comes home, he finds police investigating the murder of his wife. They immediately suspect Scott of the crime, and when he attempts to provide his alibi, he can’t track the anonymous woman down—and no one else they encountered that night will vouch for her existence. With Scott convicted of murder and staring down the death penalty, his coworker Carol Richman (Ella Raines), nicknamed “Kansas,” sets out to prove his innocence by tracking the phantom lady down. (Another relevant 1944 title, then, which Phantom Lady actually beat to theaters: Gaslight.)

The search leads Raines into a couple of sensational dialogue-free sequences that draw upon Siodmak’s experience with German Expressionism. In one, Kansas stalks a bartender and potential witness, from coolly watching him over several nights at bar to following him on the city streets to lurking on a subway platform. Though we know that Kansas is more or less in the right, Raines is still able to morph into a figure of shadowy menace, strikingly set against rainy streets and gorgeous matte paintings. In a later sequence, Kansas pretends to be interested in a drummer (Elisha Cook Jr.), who takes her to an underground jazz jam session and goes absolutely feral with intimated desire while pounding the skins. Both sequences have a seaminess that strikes a spark of contrast with their leading lady’s plucky, gal-Friday character, as if she’s briefly inhabiting other bodies through her amateur detective work. Maybe that’s why it doesn’t much matter that the particulars of the solution to Phantom Lady’s central mystery don’t bear much scrutiny (or in some cases, aren’t explained at all). The resolution feels right, the same way that waking up from a nightmare does.

Many of Siodmak’s movies have that unpredictable, shapeshifting quality: well-crafted B-pictures that seem like they can snap into a noirish fugue state at any time. This is particularly true of his other three movies with Raines, thrillers that aren’t quite straight-up noir. What differentiates them, especially without the horror elements of a Siodmak movie like The Spiral Staircase? With both The Suspect (1944) and The Strange Affair Of Uncle Harry (1945), there’s an odd coziness to them, more adjacent to gothic melodrama than the world of detectives, dames, and doomed criminals. Both movies ultimately focus on the prospect of domestic poisonings, turning on the fears of otherwise-upright men that others may take the fall for their misdeeds. (Does noir require more street scenes, maybe?) In both movies, Raines is the inciting object of desire, but—as with Phantom Lady, where she’s the desirous one—she inhabits that role as a strong-willed innocent, not a knowing temptress, even when it would almost make more sense if she were.

In The Suspect, for example, unhappily married and thoroughly henpecked Philip Marshall (Charles Laughton) develops a genteel crush through his friendship with the younger Mary Gray (Raines) and she simply, surprisingly… returns his affection. No ulterior motive is glimpsed, and when the movie implies (without actually showing) that Philip has murdered his cruelly withholding wife, there’s no sense that Mary has so much as tacitly encouraged it. She’s similarly unaware when Philip poisons his lout of a neighbor (this, it is clear, he definitely does) over his attempted blackmail—which seems to particularly chagrin Philip because it’s seemingly based on a hunch and a lie, as opposed to actual evidence that Philip killed his wife. The foggy streets of 1902 London provide sort of a proto-noir atmosphere, and the movie’s final scene in particular again slips into a dreamy twilight. Narratively, what’s happening is not supposed to be especially ambiguous: Philip is tricked into thinking he faces a stronger moral dilemma than he really does, which leads him to give up his future with Mary, walking off a ship to Canada to eventually turn himself in. Visually, though, Siodmak’s staging gives the scene a strange desolation, perhaps indicating that a moral reckoning achieved by trickery isn’t quite as noble as it looks. Philip seems as if he might somehow disappear into the fog, even as he bravely abandons his guaranteed escape.

The Strange Affair Of Uncle Harry has even less physical darkness and atmosphere than The Suspect, again positioning Raines as an escape hatch from an unhappy middle-aged relationship, this time between Harry (George Sanders) and his feuding sisters, particularly his younger sibling Lettie (Geraldine Fitzgerald). Deborah (Raines) is the sophisticated young woman who takes a shine to Harry, whose efforts to run away with he are stymied by the hypochondriac Lettie. Though the movie largely fails to live up to the strangeness promised by its title, it is notable that the most noirish elements become an actual dream; a poisoning gone awry is eventually revealed as a fake-out, in an ending that was apparently one of five being considered by the studio in an attempt to avoid a more downbeat conclusion. It’s an artistic compromise that nonetheless follows Siodmak’s style, literalizing the dreamlike state his movies often slip into.

The Suspect and Uncle Harry are well-wrought drawing-room pictures where sharp noir shadows keep intruding over mild-mannered protagonists; the final Siodmark/Raines collaboration, Time Out Of Mind, applies deeper shadows and a more gothic-forward look to a pedestrian story. Raines lands further off to the side; this time it’s her turn to play devoted sister to a troubled protagonist, defending aspiring musician Chris (Robert Hutton) from family expectations that he become a sailor. The family-melodrama stuff is pretty turgid, but Raines and Siodmak provide stylish highlights: The former in a series of terrific outfits, hats, and hairdos, and the latter via winding camera movements that explore the shadowy spaces of the family home where much of the film takes place. Apparently, Siodmak busied himself on a troubled production by working with cinematographer Maury Gertsman to compose elaborate and ambitious shots; at times, it’s as if their technique is attempting to chase the movie into a noir dream, despite the fact that the actual narrative is mostly just a rich jerk feuding with his whiny son. As Chris’ sister Rissa, Raines’ vibe is very much “OK, let me know if this gets interesting.” More than ever, she’s part of Siodmak’s beautifully moody scenery.

With their collaboration starting so strong and coming to a relatively inauspicious (if frequently gorgeous) end, it might be tempting to characterize the Raines performances in her later Siodmak movies as a waste of the potential she shows in Phantom Lady, where she truly dominates the film. But even the noirs and crime pictures she made without Siodmak don’t tend to cast her as that figure of menace or mystery she seems so well-prepared to play. She gets one strong scene in the prison crime picture Brute Force, and more to do in the double-crossing noir The Web, both aptly named movies released the same year as Time Out Of Mind. She’s a love interest in the midst of various murder schemes in Impact and A Dangerous Profession, both from 1949—and both entertaining yarns that might have benefited from Siodmak’s more stylish, distinctive touch. Siodmak, meanwhile, was moving on from his Universal years, and after a few more notable English-language productions (like the left-field delight of the comic adventure The Crimson Pirate), he would return to Europe permanently, making movies outside of the noir/thriller programmer box he occupied in Hollywood. Around that time, Raines saw her movie career wind down, retiring from movies before a stint in syndicated TV later in the ’50s. Her biggest movies were noirs and that John Wayne Western, though looking back, Raines apparently had a soft spot for a decidedly different film she made shortly after her final movie with Siodmak: In an interview a few years ago, Raines’ daughter mentioned that one of her mother’s favorites (alongside Phantom Lady and Brute Force) was The Senator Was Indiscreet—a very funny and decidedly silly comedy that casts her as a tough reporter, though she’s the film’s most sympathetic and intelligent character, not a laugh machine.

That’s characteristic of the groundedness Raines brings to her movies, despite her glamorous countenance and pin curls. In her noirs and thrillers, particularly those with Siodmak, Raines plays notes that should seem contradictory: She’s often approachable while nonetheless playing a figure of elusive, possibly illusory happiness. Her oft-cited “mystery” isn’t overt, or used as a deceptive lure; it’s more to do with playing her feelings a little closer to the vest. Movies aren’t always kind to this form of ambiguity. There are certain roles Raines fits better than others, but she never really develops a clear-as-a-bell persona to exploit or subvert. Yet it’s that very quality that makes her such an enticing presence, especially in movies with a darker hue: She won’t lock into a genre prescription. Siodmak’s films, too, are compellingly difficult to pin down even when they were supposedly limiting his range. That they’re often weirder and more dreamlike than go-to classics almost makes them purer expressions of the form. Even when they’re not at their Phantom Lady best, Raines and Siodmak feel like kindred spirits in the shadows.