A peculiar, interesting and not entirely coherent crime thriller about a woman who marries a man she barely knows and then starts wondering if he’s a killer. When Strangers Marry makes more sense as a title than Betrayed, which is the flag it flew under when it was re-released in 1949, five years after its debut. The re-release also allowed a bit of rejigging of the pecking order. Third-billed Robert Mitchum – who’d become a star in the interim – is top-billed second time round.
To be fair to everyone, Mitchum is in it more than Dean Jagger, who plays the mysterious salesman Kim Hunter’s wide-eyed Millie Baxter has married more or less sight unseen. Much to the disgruntlement of Mitchum’s Fred Baxter, another travelling salesman who’d been rejected by Millie because he was just a salesman. Ouch. Fred bumps into Millie at the New York hotel where she is meant to be meeting her new husband – presumably this is the honeymoon – and though his nose is obviously well out of joint, he’s pretty gracious about the whole thing, clearly likes Millie and even starts to help her locate her husband when he doesn’t show up.
Where is salesman Paul though? Why the mysterious rendezvous? When he does eventually get in touch, why by phone rather than turning up in person? Is everything here on the level? Fred asks the questions the audience might also ask, though the key one – who marries a man they’ve only met three times and why? – is left dangling.
The director is William Castle, who’d later become known for gimmicky horror movies like The Tingler (cinema seats wired up to vibrating devices) and House on Haunted Hill (a skeleton floating over the auditorium), and here is mostly behaving himself, limiting himself to wild lunges of the camera and sudden dramatic changes in lighting and music crashing in from nowhere. Keep them off-balance seems to be the idea. Castle’s wild juxtapositions still work.
Castle shot it all in seven days with no budget to speak of and the results are impressive. This is a well paced movie shot with extreme economy with a couple of borrowings from Hitchcock to speed things along – the screaming woman turning into a train whistle’s screech and the plot device of a stage mentalist exposing unsavoury goings-on are both from The 39 Steps.
Dynamic, you might say – the posters actually went with “DYNAMIC!” – with Castle’s expressionist montage sequence probably the most outlandish, unnecessary sequence, entertainment for its own sake. Though there is also the frankly bizarre scene where stripped-to-the-waist cop Lieutenant Blake (Neil Hamilton, who’d later be Commissioner Gordon in Adam West’s Batman) interviews Fred in a steam room, for no viable reason.
The performances, by contrast, are low key. Hunter, probably most remembered for A Matter of Life and Death, puts on a similar wide-eyed ingenue performance. Mitchum is all cool and laid back, as benign as you like. Jagger gets the toughest role to play, when he eventually turns up, and has to keep the audience guessing while making plausible excuses to his new wife as to where he’s been.
It doesn’t quite add up, the entire plot. What we do know from the self-contained opening scene – a drunk waving money about in a hotel bar who winds up strangled with a silk scarf – is that someone here is a murderer. Would you like to guess who it is?
Like a magician’s assistant Castle tries to keep our attention diverted while readying himself with rabbit and hat. You have to applaud him, the effort he puts in is absolutely heroic, though it doesn’t ultimately work. Fabulously enjoyable to watch him try though.
When Strangers Marry (Betrayed) – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
