Aka Her Heart Was In Her Throat. You’re my enemy! I hate you! An old homeless woman is murdered after seeing a light through the basement window of abandoned 11 Crescent Drive. Young Barney Fielding (Richard Lyon) witnesses the incident from his window next door at number 10. Elizabeth Howard (Gail Russell) arrives at the house to be governess to Barney and his impressionable sister Ellen (Nona Griffith) but is met with aggression from the boy who is unusually attached to their former governess, Maxine. Round here we call it the commodore’s folly. Elizabeth’s room overlooks the garden of the eerie house next door, and she finds a watch that belonged to the murdered old woman in her dressing table. Over the next few weeks, Marian Tygarth (Isobel Elsom), a widow who owns shuttered-up 11 Crescent Drive, returns to put the house up for sale. Elizabeth suspects someone is gaining access to the cellars and confides in David Fielding (Joel McCrea), the children’s widowed and secretive father but he dismisses her concerns. She turns to Dr. Charles Evans (Herbert Marshall) a neighbour and family friend who advises her not to call the police as David shouldn’t like it: Ellen doesn’t know it yet but David was once suspected of murdering his wife. The last one was pretty too. Ellen tells Elizabeth that Barney is the one who lets the lurking man into the house at night, on Maxine’s orders. The next day, the employment agency tells Elizabeth they cannot send anyone over that day. However, a new maid arrives at the house and Elizabeth eventually realises she is Maxine (Phyllis Brooks). David tries to throw Maxine out of the house and shortly afterwards she is found murdered outside the empty house. David is nowhere to be found so the police to consider him the prime suspect … It had been barred, locked and shuttered for twelve years. Devised as a way to capitalise on tragic Russell’s success in The Uninvited, this has a great pedigree. Produced by John Houseman for Paramount and directed by that film’s Lewis Allen (it was his feature debut) and photographed in luminous monochromes by the legendary John F. Seitz, it was adapted by Hagar Wilde and Ken Englund from Ethel Lina White’s novel Midnight House aka Her Heart in her Throat, with the final screenplay by Wilde and the one and only Chandler (who had a rather indifferent screenwriting history as various tomes attest). Narrated by an uncredited Ray Collins, this is a terrifically atmospheric murder mystery. I did hope you’d be a little more motherly. With a debt to both Jane Eyre and The Turn of the Screw, it’s an example of the era’s popular trope of the child witness. It’s suspenseful and filled with character detail, situated in a wonderfully overstuffed house redolent of the Gothic cycle. The nascent romance between Russell and McCrea plays with diffidence then humour: I like your smile. I like the way your hair falls out of place. I even like the way you carve. Russell has a lot of colours to play and does them sympathetically. It’s fun to see Brooks in a nice role as Maxine. It’s her final screen credit. She started out as a model and then did a number of B movies and at one time was engaged to marry Cary Grant. Instead she married JFK’s Harvard roommate Torbert Macdonald and lived out her days on the East coast where Macdonald served as a Congressman for Massachusetts and she was a renowned society hostess. Interestingly, the children here play with Disney comics and a Dumbo toy and see a Popeye cartoon at the cinema, reflective of what was popular then – and now. Longtime Welles and then Hitchcock associate Norman Lloyd has an amusing role as Jasper Goodwin. Sadly the gifted crime writer White (who had written The Wheel Spins, the basis for The Lady Vanishes) didn’t live to see this adaptation of her novel. Nor would she see Forties classic, The Spiral Staircase (1946), based on Some Must Watch. She died aged 68 in 1944. You’re nothing like twenty-five
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