Film review: Black Widow (1954)

 No, not the Marvel character.  (And not really a Black Widow of any kind, despite the pre-credit sequence explaining that this is a name for women who kill their husbands.  Unless... well, you decide.) This was billed as a rare color Noir on the Criterion Channel, but it's much more of an old-fashioned Agatha Christie number.  In fact, "old fashioned" is the appropriate adjective all-round: all the stars (except for the young woman at the center, who looks absolutely nothing like the woman in the foreground of the poster) are a bit past their prime.  Most notable is Ginger Rogers, playing a venerable stage actress with one of those dowdy 50's haircuts 

(which the young woman has too, surprisingly), but also Gene Tierney, criminally underused as the wife of our protagonist, a very bulgy-eyed, middle-aged looking Van Heflin.  Rounding out the stars-of-yesteryear is George Raft, playing the most gangster-looking cop you'll ever see.

Quick summary: young (19) orphan Nancy "Nanny" Ordway arrives from Savannah, Georgia to stay with her uncle, a fairly successful stage actor, and make her way in the big city.  She turns out to have a real knack for self-promotion (in the lingo of the film, a "purpose girl"), and quickly hooks up with a rich, arty brother and sister.  The brother falls hard for her, and while she professes to love him back, her eyes are roving.  She meets our hero, famous theater director Peter Denver at a party thrown by Roger's Lottie Marin (in the apartment directly above his own), 

a party he has been commanded to attend by his wife Iris as she boarded a plane to go and stay with her sick mother.  He invites her out to dinner, reassuring the skeptical Lottie that he has no amorous interest in the girl, who has professed to be a writer.  And in fact he tells Iris all about the meal on the phone later.  However, it seems that Nanny has become obsessed with Peter, a fact that seems to have escaped him, even as he lets her use his apartment to write in during the day while he's out.  Finally, after weeks of her mother's illness, Iris returns, and they both enter the apartment - only to find that Nanny has not cleared out as promised.  In fact - she's dangling from a rope in the bathroom!  A stick figure picture of a hanged person is found on a sheet of paper with her favorite quotation (something about the mystery of death and love) from Salome (an opera she has been playing incessantly), just like the stick figures she has been drawing on notes to Peter.  Already things look awkward for Peter, 

but they get a lot more awkward when the sister of the couple she had been staying with testifies to Raft that Nanny had told her about an affair between Peter and herself, 

and then it is discovered not just that Nanny was pregnant when she died, but that she was throttled first and then strung up.  Iris leaves again and Peter has to go on the lam to clear his name before the cops catch up with him.  Who did kill Nanny?  Whose baby was it?  If Peter wasn't her lover, why did Nanny lie?  Can we trust Peter?

It's certainly never boring, and there's some wonderful barbed dialog (particularly from Rogers' character, who is deliciously against type for her), but there is one key role that I think is badly miscast.  A Cesar Romero type would've been much better.  See if you agree - you'll know who I mean.  Kind of an odd, jokey ending, too.