Sleep, My Love

Sirk delivers the goods. I don't know what it is about these "Gaslight" scenarios that I love so much, maybe it's just so delightfully devious. Okay, so the story is pretty damn predictable, but it's a really fun movie. Claudette Colbert (teamed up once again with Don Ameche, although in a far different way than MIDNIGHT) isn't great, but it's kind of a tricky role and she pulls it off pretty well. And for once, I enjoyed a Robert Cummings performance. Unfortunately, Raymond Burr doesn't get much to do and neither does femme fatale Hazel Brooks, although she does have a fantastic entrance, as we see her shapely legs coming down the stairs. But the performances aren't the film's strength. It has terrific pacing, some amazing shots (the whole thing is photographed very nicely) and even some good bits of comedy that manage not to undercut the tension. The Chinese wedding, for example, takes a good portion of time away from the action, but it's a delightful scene that establishes the relationship between Colbert and Cummings. Maybe this isn't a groundbreaking noir, but I really enjoyed it, especially for the entertaining (if somewhat routine) plot and superb cinematography.

Claudette Colbert wakes on the train bound to Boston. She has no memory of anything beyond going to bed the previous evening. In South Station she runs into college chum Rita Johnson, and her friend, Robert Cummings. Meanwhile, Claudette's husband, Don Ameche, is reporting her as missing to the police. He seems relieved when he gets her phone call. But there's more.

It soon becomes clear this is a rather sinister film noir, with Ameche gaslighting Miss Colbert so he can have her committed. It's a slow, deliberate movie, and quite creepy, with director Douglas Sirk getting in early potshots at the well-to-do. Mary Pickford is credited as the presenter, and her husband, Charles "Buddy" Rogers is one of the producers. It's a topnotch noir, one of the last Miss Pickford produced.

This thriller starts off with Claudette Colbert asleep on a speeding train and screaming soon after awakening because she has no idea how she got there. At home husband Don Ameche is being interviewed by the police after he calls them because of her disappearance the previous evening. This will be just the first in a series of bizarre circumstances for Colbert.

This film is nicely photographed and has some impressive sets. It also features Robert Cummings as a nice young man Colbert meets who becomes interested in her, George Coulouris in thick horn rimmed glasses playing a creepy guy, something that came very naturally to George Coulouris, and Hazel Brooks, looking very seductive and slinking around, much as she had recently done in another independent production of considerably more fame today than this one, Body and Soul.

Once you realize, however, that this is another Gaslight-type thriller (and it gives its hand away fairly early), it all starts to seem like territory a little too familiar. It also gets more than a little silly when the husband puts a sleeping potion into his wife's hot chocolate at night which seems to make her highly susceptible to any suggestion that he may whisper into her ear once she falls asleep.

For myself, recalling the charm that Colbert and Ameche had brought to the screen almost a decade before when they appeared in director Mitchell Leisen's sly, sophisticated comedy bauble, Midnight, I was a little dismayed to see them together again under these Gaslight circumstances. Still, Sleep, My Love, while far fetched at times, is an adequate thriller for fans of the genre.

A man plots his wife's demise while his lover waits impatiently. It treads familiar territory, with the story a variation of "Gaslight." However, it's a lot of fun, thanks to a good cast, a fast pace, and an engaging script. Colbert and Ameche collaborate for the third time ("Midnight" being the best) while Cummings plays a character similar to the one he later played in "Dial M for Murder." The tension is nicely balanced with touches of humor, with Johnson providing most of the comic relief. Before he became known for directing a series of melodramas in the 1950s, Sirk dabbled in some film noir, and this is his best, a big improvement over the previous year's "Lured."

Sleep, My Love is Douglas Sirk's crack at Gaslight. Dabbling in drugs and Mesmerism, Don Ameche rigs up psychotic "episodes" starring his wife, Claudette Colbert, so he can inherit her money. Befriended by Robert Cummings during one of these arranged "fugue" states, she unwittingly enlists an ally whose affections, and suspicions, grow. (The film takes on inadvertent Charlie Chan overtones when Cummings goes sleuthing with his blood-brother Keye Luke, who often played the Honolulu detective's eldest offspring.)

Unlike Cukor's claustrophobic Gaslight, with Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer, Sleep, My Love is less psychologically nuanced and more plot-driven. It benefits from Hazel Brooks, delivering an icily stylized vamp turn as The Other Woman; she appeared in one other noir, Body and Soul, during her disappointing brief career. George Couloris (the guardian in Citizen Kane) adds color as a confederate of Ameche's, while Raymond Burr is wasted as a minion of the law.

That leaves the three principals as well as some problems. The amicable Ameche can't summon up the cold, controlling menace that Boyer spread through Gaslight; his adversary, the equally amicable Cummings, succumbs to terminal blandness. Colbert is more problematic. Unlike the languorous, instinctive Bergman, she made her name in part due to her quick wits; you can't buy her as a submissive wifey who hasn't cottoned on to her husband's philandering -- at the very least -- without having it spelled out to her by Cummings, whose acumen seems as low-wattage as his star power. (On the other hand, she was to find herself in a similar pickle the next year in The Secret Fury.) Sirk's direction here, as in Lured, lacks the distinctiveness he showed in his other noir, Shockproof, and was to develop lushly in the haut-fifties melodramas like Written on the Wind for which he is justly renowned.