whom we have seen previously in The Walking Hills. She plays Carol, the secretary of an engineer Scott Henderson who gets arrested for the murder of his wife after a night out with a strange woman (he and his wife had had a serious fight) who never tells him her name, and who cannot be traced, and whom nobody he saw on the night out claims to have seen with him (hence "Phantom Lady"). The film begins with them meeting at a bar. She seems strangely distant, but is wearing a very striking (i.e., rather ridiculous) hat,
which is actually identical to the one worn by the star of the show they end up seeing together (that Henderson had planned to take his wife to for their anniversary). The star is not Carmen Miranda, but it is in fact her sister, Aurora Miranda (did you know there were three Mirandas?), and she takes great exception to somebody else in the audience having a hat like hers (which, we find out later, she has made specially, so there aren't supposed to be duplicates). However, the drummer of the band, played by the most recognizable face in this film, the great-at-playing-little-weasels Elisha Cook Jr., takes no exception, and in fact winks lasciviously at its wearer.
Strange indeed, then, that he joins all the other people who "didn't see" the Phantom Lady when asked by the cops (who, in a process I'm sure isn't standard procedure, drag Henderson around town with them to help question witnesses). Now, here is the first of many problems with the plot. All of the people remember seeing Henderson, which places him away from the scene of the crime at the time his wife was murdered, but strangely, just because the woman he insists on talking about wasn't there, he is convicted and send to death row.
Why is the woman even relevant, when you have that many witnesses? But be that as it may, after Henderson is locked up, Carol decides to investigate, and begins by badgering the barman at the bar where Henderson and the Phantom Lady met up. She ends up getting him so rattled that he contemplates pushing her under a train before he himself later runs in front of a car. Nice going, Carol - killing the witnesses. When she gets home she finds one of the cops who helped to get Henderson locked up waiting for her - but it's not what she thinks.
He's decided that Henderson is in fact innocent (for the flimsiest of reasons), and wants to help her clear his name. So next on the agenda is to try to pump Elisha Cook's little drummer for info, and for this Carol dresses up like a tramp and refers to herself as a "Hep Kitten". There follows the weirdest sequence in the whole movie, where Cook takes her to a jazz club and they sort of fall into an orgasmic trance. (This site about Cook makes it a centerpiece of their discussion of him.)
Anyway, as happens to Cook in basically all his films, he is murdered, and by the same guy who killed Henderson's wife. The killer is played by Franchot Tone, who gets top billing, and perhaps deservedly so, because he is genuinely disturbing as the "Paranoic" crazy killer. Tone was apparently something of a star, and the main source of discord between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. He does a great job of conveying a man slowly going C-R-A-Z-Y. It helps that he's a sculptor who likes to throttle his victims, so he does a lot of staring in horror at his hands.
I won't give away anything else, as there's something of a reveal halfway through the film, before the last act where you are desperate for Carol and her cop buddy to catch up and work out who's who. Check it out - you'll laugh, but you won't be bored! But you will wonder (for several reasons) about 40's psychological theories...
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