Obsession (1949)

Directed by Edward Dmytryk. Starring Robert Newton, Phil Brown, Sally Gray, Naunton Wayne, James Harcourt, Olga Lindo.

London shrink (Newton) plots the perfect murder, targeting his wife’s American lover (Brown), but as they say, perfection takes time and patience, and while the kidnapped victim is imprisoned in a secret room for months, this gives a Scotland Yard detective (Wayne) time to solve the case—but will it be enough time? British suspsenser strains for the shadowy atmosphere of film noir, but is mostly just murky, and declining story interest during the second act makes the calculated pace feel sluggish at times, but things ramp up nicely toward the end. Newton is surprisingly restrained (by his standards) as the heavy, but Wayne isn’t an equal adversary, and with the customary “cold around the heart” macabre efficiency in place for this non-Hollywood production, I longed for virtuoso manipulations to make me care more about the outcome as something other than an exercise in clever genre mechanisms and refined psychological torture. Taken from a novel/play (“A Man About a Dog”) by Alec Coppel. Also known as The Hidden Room.

64/100