Phantom Lady (Universal) is the maiden production of Joan Harrison, who used to be Alfred Hitchcock's Girl Friday and who now becomes one of the few women producers in Hollywood's history.-Phantom Lady lags behind Hitchcock's best films, but it has picked up enough from them to sprint laps ahead of most thrillers.
The night when Architect Scott Henderson (Alan Curtis) meets her in a Manhattan bar and takes her to a show, the Lady (Fay Helm) is no phantom. Her handsome dolor is made the more memorable by a fiercely rhetorical hat. At the evening's end she drifts off without giving her name, and Architect Henderson drifts homeward to find detectives chewing cigars and chicle over his strangled wife. All efforts to find his alibi prove useless. The bartender (Andrew Tombes) has never seen her. Neither has the randy little drummer (Elisha Cook Jr.) who ogled her all evening. Neither has the Latin singer (Carmen Miranda's sister, Aurora), who threw a jealous tantrum because she and the Lady were wearing duplicate hats. Henderson is convicted of murder.
But his Secretary Carol (Ella Raines) realizes that somebody has stopped a lot of mouths with a lot of money. She hounds the nervous bartender. He is killed by a car. She starts pumping the drummer. He is strangled. Escorted by her boss's good friend, Jack Lombard (Franchot Tone), she even locates the maker of the special hat and its elusive wearer. But nothing really becomes clear to her until Good Friend Lombard tips his paranoiac hand.
Miss Harrison, with notable help from mood-wise Cameraman Elwood Bredell, invests this grade-B plot with a lot of style and scare. Some of the dialogue is ham, and toward the end the picture's edginess blunts noticeably. But the bar and bartender, the damp night streets, a late-night elevated platform, and a jam session that looks like an expressionistic death dance, have a good deal of Hitchcock's sinister melo-realistic melancholy.
My Sex. Asked in what respect she differs from other Hollywood producers, Joan Harrison, 34, tilts one blonde eyebrow, grins, and replies, "I use my sex.;' When, against Universal's better judgment, she became a Universal producer, the studio sent around a photographer to immortalize the event. "Well," snapped Miss Harrison, "do you want some leg art?" (see cut). Besides using a pair of ah-inspiring legs, she also uses a mind trained at the Sorbonne, at Oxford, and by England's shrewdest director.
Ten years ago, a friend roused her from a late morning hangover with the news that Alfred Hitchcock was advertising for a secretary. Hangover & all, Miss Harrison hurried 30 miles to London, bluffed her way past twelve applicants, and won out over 40 others whom Hitchcock had already interviewed.