This is an excellent little drop of poison. I was about to say that it could have easily been a play, because of how tightly scripted it was, when I see in its Wikipedia entry that it was indeed originally a play. Let's jump right in: it begins with a man arriving at a house at night that one assumes is his, as he has a key and calls out "anyone home?" when he comes in. But he behaves strangely: rifling through draws and closets, finding a lot of letters and gift tags that show that somebody called Richard is showing affection on somebody who lives there. Is this Richard? Or is this Lee, the name signed to a rather petulant telegram asking why the woman never writes. After gathering up some items the man then leaves, apparently dead set on accomplishing some task. He then shows up at an apartment and knocks on the door. A tall thin man (Dennis Price, of Kind Hearts and Coronets renown) answers, who doesn't appear to recognize him, but lets him in. This, in fact, is Richard, and he will not live to regret letting in the man whom he did not recognize as the husband, Lee Warren, of his lover, Vivian. Both of them speak in cut glass received pronunciation and are terribly civil to each other, but the loathing on Lee's part is clear. He demands that Richard break ties with Vivian and write a letter to that effect, stipulating that he, Richard, can see that it's hopeless and Vivian will never stop loving Lee, and that he is taking the coward's way out and leaving town.
Richard completes the letter only for Lee to spill a drink on it and request that Richard re-write it. A bit put out, Richard nonetheless does so, only for Lee to stick a gun in his ribs just as he gets to the part about the coward's way out (as one might have already foreseen). He then swiftly ties Richard hand and foot with large scarves (made, he announces, out of silk, so as not to leave marks) and informs Richard that he is going to kill him, unless he can come up with a flaw in his murder plan. This entails slipping a sort of pillowslip-and-hose contraption over Richard's head, gassing him, then dragging him to the kitchen and leaving him with his head in the oven as if he's committed suicide. Nobody will believe that this could be murder, as who could force a person's head in an oven? (Maybe Hitchcock took this as a challenge.) Anyway, alas for Richard, he cannot see any loopholes and thus is soon laid out cold on the kitchen floor. Lee makes sure he's wiped the glasses they drank out of clean and is about to leave the apartment when the buzzers sounds and to his horror he hears voices outside and a key in the lock. He scurries back into the kitchen and overhears a couple enter, one of whom is... Vivian! And the other is her current lover. Lee is forced to recall something Richard told him before he met his fate, which was that he, Richard, was not Vivian's only lover and that "you can't kill them all!" "Oh can't I," thinks Lee, as he narrowly escapes discovery (the man, who is even taller than Richard (is this a commentary on Lee's perceived inadequacies?) and whose name we shall discover is Jimmy Martin, puts his hand on the door of the kitchen to get ice for the drinks he has poured for them only to be called back by Vivian. He does comment on the smell of gas, though.) Lee does knock over a milk bottle before leaving, however.
Vivian takes Jimmy back to the house we've seen earlier and indulges in some heavy petting, not even pausing when the "very discreet" maid returns from a night out,
before sending Jimmy away and retiring, self-satisfied, into the bedroom... where she discovers Lee in his pajamas in bed! After initial shock, Vivian decides to act on the assumption that Lee has not heard anything, and acts delighted to see him home unexpectedly. Lee is cold towards her, but does not let on that he knows about her infidelity, merely demanding to know why she failed to write to him. We find out in flashback that he has been in America, sent there by his job, and while he pined and wrote, she gave up very quickly.
Cut to breakfast next morning where Vivian seems on edge and asks why Lee isn't going into work. He claims he has been given a few days off... and then Jimmy arrives with a huge bunch of flowers, to Vivian's horror, but Lee's apparent delight. Vivian soon becomes angry at Lee's torturing the couple and she flounces into the other room before Jimmy retreats with his tail between his legs.
After this, the exact order of events is a bit hazy. An inspector (who seemed very familiar, and was, in fact, Jack Warner) with a Scottish sidekick (shades of Hornleigh again!) is brought in to investigate. He calls in Richard's sister, whom, we soon discover, was also Jimmy's former beau from whom Vivian stole him - so both siblings could feel aggrieved at Vivian (who is a real piece of work). He then (I think) goes over the the Warren's house (because of the note Richard had been forced to write, and the sister's help in identifying Vivian) where he first meets Lee and then Vivian,
whose face, when she reads the "suicide note" is a picture of smugness, as she is evidently delighted that somebody would kill himself over her. However, she is less happy when Jimmy gets arrested for the crime (not only because of the fingerprints at Richard's flat, but because Lee planted the pillowslip contraption, which revealed its purpose to the cops by reeking of gas, in Jimmy's car), and still less when Lee reveals that he was responsible but is perfectly content to let Jimmy take the fall.
Lee's plan in telling her this is to watch it eat her up inside, unable to do anything to save Jimmy lest she be implicated, but she thwarts the plan by disappearing (leaving a note addressed with the film title). This drives Lee a bit off the rails (I mean, he is pathologically jealous and generally obsessed with her) and that and increasing unease about Jimmy means he stops being able to sleep, to the extent that he has to go to a doctor to get sleeping pills. And then, suddenly, Vivian is back, claiming to love him but also asking for his help in saving Jimmy. After some thought, Lee's solution is to go to the inspector and claim that Richard actually did commit suicide but that he, Lee, framed Jimmy out of jealousy. The inspector is initially reluctant to believe this, but knowing details about the pillowslip contraption and the bottle of milk, along with an incident where Jimmy and Richard's sister are left alone in a bugged room together
convince him that it wasn't Jimmy. But he then becomes convinced that it was, in fact, Lee. He confronts Vivian alone and bluntly states that he knows it was Lee but can't prove it, but unless Vivian turns on Lee he'll have to punish Jimmy. She refuses to crack, but hatches her own fiendish plan to solve the problem,
which involves those sleeping pills and a letter to match the one Richard wrote. Who will make it out of this alive? Watch it and see.
Overall, top notch. All the actors are good in their way, although Eric Portman as Lee is a standout,
as is Jack Warner, albeit with less scenery to chew. Greta Gynt as Vivian is occasionally over-the-top, but you want that in a villain, and they get some great faces out of her. My only complaint is: why doesn't Vivian agree to the inspector when he confronts her? At the time you think it's because she really loves Lee, but does Vivian really love anyone?
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