A diabolically brilliant plot is the making of Whirlpool, a very noirish whodunit from 1950, which gets off to a flying start with a rich psychiatrist’s wife, played by Gene Tierney at her most fragile, being caught shoplifting in a department store. Within seconds it’s been revealed that Ann Sutton (Tierney) is a kleptomaniac but rather than take her problems to her husband, the city’s go-to guy for mental problems, she’s been keeping her secret dark, which has now laid her open to manipulation by David Korvo (José Ferrer), a hypnotist, astrologer and all-round quack who is soon putting the squeeze on Mrs Sutton – she initially thinks he wants money or sex, but he’s after much, much more. And maybe sex and money as well.
Older ideas of mesmerism and newer ones of psychoanalysis bump heads in this fraught melodramatic drama. Full of lip-quivering scenes for Tierney, it’s interspersed with plenty of the hypnotised Mrs S gliding about glassy-eyed doing Korvo’s sulphurous bidding, undermining her marriage, allowing a terrible crime to happen and putting herself in the frame for it while Korvo – recovering in hospital from a gall-bladder operation – appears to have the perfect alibi by virtue of his incapacity.
The flaw that Korvo is exploiting is not just Mrs S’s hysterical illness – hysteria, from the word uterus, could not be better applied than in this film, pre- or post-feminist interpretations notwithstanding – but also the transactional nature of the Suttons’ marriage. “Bill, you’re wonderful. You’ve always been so wonderful to me,” Ann says rather unnecessarily (it seems) early on to her husband. He responds with: “Just stay as you are, as you’ve always been, healthy and adorable.” In other words, she married for his wonderfulness (money) and he for her adorableness (hotness) and her ability to stay that way.
It’s the plot that makes it so brilliant and even towards the finale it’s still winding Ann into tighter, more inescapable boxes. So tight, in fact, that when husband Bill (Richard Conte) and cop Lt Colton (Charles Bickford) finally start getting some traction on the problem, screenwriters Ben Hecht and Andrew Solt hit the only obstruction in their slick adaptation of Guy Endore’s novel. They have saved way too much explanation for the film’s closing moments, which are dense with revelation and on top of everything else also require Ann and Bill to renegotiate the terms of their marriage.
It’s an Otto Preminger film, hence the lurid, newspaper-adjacent storyline – Adultery! Embezzlement! Murder! Hypnotism! The power of the unconcious mind was quite the staple back then and gives Preminger a licence to indulge himself and pump up the melodrama a touch – dark forces unleashed etc. The classy production also has Preminger’s hallmarks. Lovely camerawork and lighting by Arthur C Miller that’s clean, bright, subtle and occasionally properly noirish.
Tierney is just right as the mentally unstable woman who’s always had issues with men in authority and has spent her whole life trying to assert herself against her father, her husband and now Korvo and cop Colton. Richard Conte as her husband is a touch lifeless when he needs to be animated (Conte is better as a bad guy than a good guy). Ferrer is the film’s star, as the oily hypnotist with a keen interest in wealthy women. Bickford is excellent as the tough but not brutal cop.
It moves on castors, with Preminger acting as a kind of magician in chief, putting the lady in the box, sawing her in half and then pulling back to reveal not only that the woman is still in one whole piece but how the trick was done. The Freudian daddy-issues stuff adds a flavour that can be entirely ignored, according to taste, it’s really the elaborate plotting that’s the marvel here.
Whirlpool – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
