Whirlpool

A woman is taken terrible advantage of by a hypnotist in "Whirlpool," a 1949 film starring Gene Tierney, Jose Ferrer, and Richard Conte, directed by Otto Preminger. Tierney is the wife of a successful psychiatrist who is caught shoplifting. She is helped by Ferrer, a hypnotist who steps in during her interrogation. He works with her to help her solve some of her problems, but he adds some other hypnosis as well.

This isn't a great Preminger. The acting is good, but the script is weak. First of all, is it really possible to hypnotize someone that completely? I don't know. What I do know is that it's absolutely against all ethics to talk about a patient with anyone as freely as Conte does. Since a good deal of the plot hinges on his breaking of that doctor-patient privilege, the story doesn't hold up.

Gene Tierney is her usual beautiful self. This is not, however, a role that plays to her strengths as an actress. She's sympathetic but doesn't explore the range of the role enough. She more easily played an icy or feisty type. In those days, as actresses neared 30, studios became less interested, and Tierney found herself in roles which she was not particularly right for - or that wasted her talent just to fulfill her contractual obligations. Ferrer is excellent as the oily hypnotist, keeping his voice even when he was saying the most outrageous things. Conte is very good as well as Tierney's husband.

All in all, this was interesting to watch, but it could have been much better given the talent behind and before the camera.

One of the first things that struck me about Whirlpool is how good an actress Gene Tierney actually was. She does such a terrific job of portraying both the vulnerability and desperation of her character.

Set in Los Angeles, Whirlpool is an unassuming and unpretentious thriller that sort of fits the mold of noir. The movie certainly isn't the best example of the genre, but it does have many fine elements that, combined with Ms. Tierney's performance, make it eminently watchable.

Gene Tierney stars as Ann Sutton. Ann is the wealthy and respectable wife of successful psychiatrist Dr. William Sutton (a marvelous Richard Conte). The film opens as Ann is caught shoplifting a jeweled broach from a ritzy department store. The police and the store manager are determined to prosecute, but she gets off the hook thanks to David Korvo (Jose Ferrer), a mysterious hypnotist whom Ann employs to help her sleep.

Ann initially thinks that Korvo is out to blackmail her, and she offers him a large some of money to keep him quiet. Korvo, however, has another, far more furtive agenda. As he gradually builds Ann's trust, it soon is revealed that he has been having an affair with Sutton's former patient Theresa Randolph (Barbara O'Neil).

Shortly thereafter, Theresa turns up dead, and Ann is implicated as the murderer since she was found at the scene of the crime. Ann is arrested and charged with murder, but bitterly denies involvement telling her kindly husband that she just can't remember anything. So, who is the murderer? Surely it can't have been Korvo, as he was in the hospital during the time of Theresa's death.

It is left up to Lt. Colton (Charles Bickford) to use his detective skills and Dr. Sutton as the committed psychiatrist to break the hold that Korvo has on Ann and finally learn the truth behind the Theresa's murder.

Ferrer is terrific as the enigmatic Korvo. From the beginning it's plainly obvious that he's a sleazy, amoral confidence trickster, who is probably out to milk the Ann of her money and nothing happens to compromise his position. Richard Conte is also very good as Ann's concerned husband; he knows that his wife is not guilty but he's frustrated at the lack of inaction on behalf the local police to prove her innocence.

The issues of hypnotherapy, especially with the idea that hypnosis can make people do stuff they don't want to, is also interesting. Although, by today's standards it perhaps doesn't carry the kind of psychological weight and dramatic punch that it did back when the film was made.

Perhaps influenced by the wave of films during the period that utilized the growing field of hypnotherapy the picture might have seemed a bit fresher when it was first released. However, the Whirlpool is still fun to watch, especially for the lovely Gene Tierney who apparently used Whirlpool as a comeback after a two-year absence. Mike Leonard September 05.

Another complex, at times morally ambiguous film noir from Otto Preminger, engaging the services of top writer Ben Hecht and actors of the quality of Gene Tierney & Jose Ferrer to give it life. It's old ground of course for all of them, Preminger and Tierney had teamed up in "Laura" and, with Hecht were to do so again in the soon-come "Where the Sidewalk Ends" while Hecht had previously turned psychoanalysis to thrilling effect in Hitchcock's "Spellbound". There are certainly some typically subversive little Preminger / Hecht touches, I detect, of voyeurism and fetishism, running the film close, I would imagine, to the prevailing moral code of the day, which the former was to take on further in "The Moon Is Blue" and to some kind of apogee in "Anatomy Of A Murder" 10 years later. Look and listen closely here and you'll see the camera fading out a shot of Tierney's husband just about to disrobe his wife after she falls into a hypnotically induced deep-sleep and at another point the salacious quote addressed to Tierney by morally corrupt blackmailing hypnotist/astrologist (what a CV!) Ferrer about "undressing her scruples". I was even pulled up by the scenes of the blood-marks on the floor from Ferrer's character as something you didn't see everyday in the sanitised, Hollywood still coming to terms with the Communist witch-hunt in the post-war era. The playing is excellent, Tierney, who I've only just discovered as an actress (largely through watching old film-noirs!) is again radiantly beautiful as the ashamed kleptomaniac, desperate for a cure, but at the same time conveying her character's complexity and inner toughness as she finally breaks the hypnotic spell cast on her by Ferrer. For me, Ferrer steals the movie, making your skin crawl in every scene he plays once his perverted (in every sense of the word) designs become apparent. Their scenes together, where he can hardly conceal his lust for Tierney and desire to break up her happy home are electric and he also gets a lengthy scene where he hypnotises himself against the excruciating after-effects of his self-conducted gall-bladder operation. He completely convinces you of his strength of will over his physical pain to enable him to go after Tierney as she struggles to recover her amnesia which will of course expose his own guilt. The direction is taut, the cinematography excellent, the settings convincing and I also especially appreciated the excellent use of music to dramatise key scenes. Naturally there's a large degree of implausibility about just how Tierney finds herself under the control of such a toxic character and the denouement is perhaps more complicated and played out than it might be but this is still a highly intelligent, challenging piece of cinema, further pushing back the barriers of adult cinema in late 40's Hollywood.

Oh sure, Ann Sutton could pay for that pin - or for many other things - but there's something, probably, about the thrill of taking something, very non-chalant out of a store, especially as an unsuspecting adult white woman in the late 40's, and not getting caught. Is it Kleptomania? Perhaps. But the point is, at the start of Whirlpool, Ann gets caught at a department store stealing a pin, and she's in luck that David Korvo is there to help excuse her away - these are false charges after all, she has the money to buy a dozen of these pins, right - but there's a catch to her being let go: not so much for money, at least it seems at first. She tries to pay him, but for five thousand, p-shaw. No, he wants to get at her mind, to find what it is that made her do this thing... but it will lead to murder.

Gene Tierney and Jose Ferrer play Ann and Korvo, and they're both excellent here. Even a one and a half note character (not quite one, maybe, almost two dimensional, if it tried) like Ann's husband Bill gets a solid performance out of Richard Conte, to the point where we really feel for their marriage, and see the conflict very plain as soon as Ann 'turns' on to her 'nothing's the matter' tone of voice to her husband after she comes home and tells the maid that there's something very wrong and she must speak to her husband soon as he gets home. Is she crazy? Has she been driven mad? She's no femme fatale really - she is in what seems to be a fairly happy marriage (though at one critical point she'll say otherwise in a very tense confessional). But she is flawed and interesting, and that helps.

It's especially good that this character is so strong, as well as Korvo being an equally strong, conniving villain, and we know he's a villain from basically minute one but the fun is seeing how he does things like slip a glass with the lady's fingerprints into his jacket while she's away for a minute from the lunch table. But there's a couple of plot holes here that are jarring - one is more character-based and comes in the third act, it felt like a scene was missing that involved convincing a particular character to give Ann one more chance, and there was a connective tissue from the convincing to her not in prison - and I have to wonder how much they cut out of the book. It seems like a lot. Not to mention the notion of how completely tight the hypnosis can be, just how air-tight a plot can be (that we don't really see be suggested by the way) for Ann to go out in her car and get those records and then for that other thing to happen.

Whirlpool isn't weak tea by any means, but I have to think Preminger, despite some clever camera angles and the usual flair for hardcore film noir as a director (the tension in that final scene is really terrific, especially how a character hides just until a certain moment) would have had some trouble without this cast. Thankfully, Tierney gives this character credibility and she makes her fragile, torn and frayed, and when she's in her hypnotic trances it's like she's walking on air. I even liked the one/two scene turn by Barbara O'Neil (Constance Collier also has some good lines). Not something to rush to see, but it's a fair follow-up for the director and star from Laura - more of a B-side if one were to screen them back to back

In a movie like "Whirlpool" you must take the good together with the weaknesses and naivety. The story is reasonably interesting and entertaining: the quack doctor Korvo (Jose' Ferrer) hypnotizes and cheats Ann Sutton (Gene Tierney), the spouse of a distinguished psychoanalyst (Richard Conte). A mysterious murder ensues... Unfortunately, some twists of the story are unplausible, to say the least. The moody atmosphere and the suspense are tame, even for the standards of the 1940's.

The black and white cinematography and the use of the camera are excellent. The direction by Otto Preminger is sound. The job of the cast is very good, especially by Jose' Ferrer, Gene Tierney and Charles Bickford, as the old, life-weary policeman. Richard Conte is less convincing, possibly due to the uneasy character he has to play: a famous analyst who, indeed, is incredibly dumb in getting the mental problems of his adorable spouse. There is a certain evidence that old masters of film-making had no much esteem of psychoanalysis: here Dr. Sutton seems far less competent in psychology than the quack doctor Korvo.

The major credit of "Whirlpool" is the presence of Gene Tierney. Her divine beauty shines through the film, although it somewhat makes Dr. Sutton seem even more stupid. I say: Sutton neglects Gene Tierney, to go to some blasted scientific conference. Are you kidding or what? And Gene has some scenes to show her outstanding talent as an actress. For instance, see Gene at the police station, first dizzy at her voids of memory, thereafter bravely facing and ill-using her husband, who thinks her to be an adulteress (another great job by Sutton! He is really a genius!).

Thus Gene Tierney's class, loveliness, radiant beauty, talent are largely enough to erase the defects of "Whirlpool". Let me recommend this nice movie.