Whirlpool (Preminger, 1950): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6pm
This film is part of the Gene Tierney season at BFI Southbank and also screens on April 21st. Full details here.
Time Out review:
The same themes and the same cool style as in Laura and Angel Face
are at work in this portrait of the wealthy and sophisticated cracking
apart at the seams, under pressure from psychological hang-ups,
repressed passion, and innocent gullibility. When rich kleptomaniac
Gene Tierney turns for help not to her psychoanalyst husband (Richard Conte) but to a
hard-hearted hypnotherapist (Jose Ferrer), she finds herself bereft of
memory and implicated in a murder. Preminger translates the rather daft
story (scripted by a pseudonymous Ben Hecht, loosely adapting Guy Endore's novel Methinks the Lady)
into a typically unhysterical and lucid examination of people under
stress: as the crime is investigated, currents of distrust, fear, and
falsehood disturb the smooth waters of an apparently happy marriage.
Content to observe rather than moralise, he creates a world of
sympathetically flawed characters, the magnificent exception being the
swindling quack, a manipulating charmer whose underplaying by Ferrer
suggests credible evil. With its noir themes played out in cold,
bright interiors, it's a fine example of the way Preminger, on occasion,
managed to deflect routine melodrama into something more personal and
profound.
Geoff Andrew
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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