WHEN STRANGERS MARRY (73)

Directed by: William Castle (1944)

Starring: Kim Hunter, Dean Jagger, Robert Mitchum

The Pitch: A newlywed starts to suspect she may have married a murderer.

Theo Sez: Shockingly good, though it shouldn't really be such a shock : admittedly it's a B movie, all but forgotten now, but it was championed in its day by heavyweight critics like James Agee and Manny Farber (you could say it's the 40s equivalent to something like ONE FALSE MOVE), and its credentials are first-class (Philip Yordan co-writing, score by Dmitri Tiomkin, two future Oscar winners among the cast). Not that it's particularly ambitious - it only lasts about an hour, for one thing - nor is it even a classically tight, no-frills second feature like THE WINDOW (or TREMORS, to give a 90s example) : it's closer to the Val Lewton horror films being made around the same time, heavy on strange, irrational atmosphere and laced with Expressionistic touches, especially in the final stages when the couple go on the run and everything around them seems fraught with menace - most memorably in an ultra-low-angle shot of a door opening ve-e-ery slowly, with the camera looking up practically from floor-level. It's all a bit gimmicky, presaging Castle's later career as the producer of bizarrely-marketed horror films (electric buzzers under theatre seats for performances of THE TINGLER, that kind of thing), but it's also an object-lesson in how much tension you can get just by leaving things unshown - shots of feet instead of faces, a murderer in a cloth hat seen from the back as he sits on a bar stool (a bit like the killer-in-the-high- collar shot in the 1949 D.O.A.). And of course there's Mitchum in an early role, looking rangy and almost simian, and definitely uncomfortable in a boy-next-door-type role ; it's not really a surprise when...but no, I shouldn't.