Strangers in the Night (1944)

Sergeant Johnny Meadows (William Terry) is sent home from the war with a back injury. He’s making his way to the home of Rosemary Blake (Linda Stirling), a woman he fell in love with by letter and through a shared love of “A Shropshire Lad” (you certainly can’t say much against her taste), hoping to finally meet and talk to the woman he plans on marrying.

On the train, Johnny has what would be a meet-cute under different circumstances with Dr Leslie Ross (Virginia Grey). Leslie just happens to be the – scandalously! - female physician who has just taken over the practice in the small town where Rosemary and her family live, so they’ll probably have time to further pretend not to be attracted to one another later on.

When Johnny arrives at the Blake mansion, he is greeted by Rose’s mother Hilda (Helene Thimig) and her live-in friend Ivy Miller (Edith Barrett). Hilda is very happy to meet Johnny, but Rose is apparently away for a couple of days for very vague reasons. Johnny’s very welcome to stay until she returns, though. Which he does, only to become increasingly convinced that something’s not quite right about this whole business. Isn’t Hilda’s behaviour peculiar, even creepy? And why is Ivy so nervous? On the positive side, Leslie is drawn into the affair too and turns out to be a decent amateur detective, and a good woman to have at one’s back.

Which, honestly, is one of the more remarkable elements of the film, symptomatic for the way director Anthony Mann – here very much at the beginning of his career shooting a short programmer for Republic – treats his female lead as a complete character, still fully competent in her job and in life even when she’s falling in love, which is usually the point in movies of this time when a woman turns all damsel-y. Even better, the film portrays the crap a female physician like Leslie has to go through sympathetically, with a couple of scenes of her and her nurse (Frances Morris) rolling their eyes companionably at the world feeling particularly true to life.

As a suspense movie with Gothic elements, Strangers in the Night isn’t completely successful, though. In this case, the brisk 59 minute running time simply isn’t quite enough for everything the film is trying to do, leaving Mann little room to fill out the ghost story without the supernatural, the grown-up reading of a conventional movie romance (which of course makes it pretty unconventional), and the proto Evil Biddy film this turns out to be. Even this early in his career, Mann is a highly efficient storyteller, but even he can’t quite make a viewer ignore that the main characters could really use at least a couple of scenes to flesh out their characters, and that the film simply doesn’t have the space to go further into its more interesting ideas, or to explore its clear interest in portraying nonjudgmentally how World War II has shifted the relationships between women and men in the USA of its time as deeply as the theme deserves.


Still, the film has quite a few effective moments of creepy mood and effective suspense, Mann, aptly supported by DP Reggie Lanning who does quite a bit of John Alton-like work with depth of field and chiaroscuro, turning what would be a cheap little programmer in lesser hands into something that is at the very least always interesting to watch and think about, rather beautiful to look at, and entertaining even more than seventy years later, even though one might wish it to be a bit deeper.