L'homme aux lunettes d'écaille

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.

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.

Sleep, My Love (1948)

OK, it's a no brainer. I love Claudette Colbert, I love this post-war period, and I love Douglas Sirk, the director. So it only figures that this unfolds in a delicious way.

The closest film to this is "Gaslight," which George Cukor makes into something more intense and memorable than this. But "Gaslight" is burdened by a kind of contorted plot--the reasoning behind the fake madness is some crazy lost jewel. This one, by fortunate contrast, is a really believable plot, and Colbert is faced with a very normal plot of a husband out to drive her away.

There are some weaknesses--the husband's girlfriend is pretty stiff, the Chinese pal is decent but sort of tacked on, and the overall development of things is too linear for a second viewing. But as a straight up drama, from start to finish, it's really strong. And a surprise for me was how charming in a low key way was Robert Cummings, the white knight of the story. Colbert's husband was played by the more famous Don Ameche, who is fine, though you get a sense he's going through the paces of a part, something he wasn't quite invested in.

The director is famous for his later dreamy, drippy soap opera movies that are quite something on their own terms, but this is good, and an important one to see if you like his work. For me, above all, is just another great Colbert appearance. First rate in many ways.

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.

In maybe the only time he was a villain on screen Don Ameche uses his dapper charm against type playing a coldblooded man who is trying to drive his very rich wife Claudette Colbert out of her mind. Ameche has been thoroughly seduced by a sultry Hazel Brooks otherwise he'd probably stay a rich kept husband, it's Colbert who has all the bucks in the family.

As part of his plan he has George Coulouris who took a patent out on sinister and who is a photographer in real life going in the guise of a psychiatrist. That and some psychotropic drugs administered and a little amnesia have Colbert thinking she is indeed ready for the rubber room.

Sleep My Love is a combination of Gaslight and Dial M For Murder and the comparisons are obvious since Bob Cummings plays the same kind of role in both films, the sympathetic friend who gives the heroine a shoulder to cry on. He's a bit more proactive in this film than in the Hitchcock classic as he figures out slowly that Colbert is not just imagining things.

Keye Luke has a role of companion 'brother' to Cummings. In fact Colbert and Cummings attend his wedding during the film. What was nice here was that his role was stereotypical in no way. Luke was not constantly make a mess that Charlie Chan would have to straighten out.

As much as the stars give good performances, you will remember Hazel Brooks from this film more than anyone. How a sexy woman like that never had a major career one can only wonder.

Arise My Love was a United Artists release and produced by one of the founding mothers of the studio Mary Pickford. A role she might well have played in the later stages of her career. And Hitchcock himself couldn't have done better with the suspense.