tbarnes1960 A real production line movie that has its moments, but ultimately not really worth it. Best parts are when Dame May tells the as always super creepy McCready to "Put that knife away" . Those scenes are a hoot! However, those are countered by some of the worst acting on film by Joy Harington as Bertha the housekeeper. Other than hiring an actor who had never heard the English language could those lines be delivered any worse. It has decent atmosphere and cinematography, but in this case director John H Lewis, who in his IMDb bio is said to be famous for elevating mediocre content with great style, does not pull off a cinematic miracle. However, if you watch another of his films THE BIG COMBO (1955) there are some amazing examples of just that.

vincentlynch-moonoi This is a nifty little suspense film...never mind that it is somewhat improbably (all the more so since there are holes in the plot)...it's still entertaining.It was a rather cheap B-picture, but that didn't keep one actress from shining through -- Dame May Witty as the mother who is protecting her adult son from being discovered as the murderer of his wife. To do so, they kidnap a young lady looking for a job (Nina Foch), and publicly treat her as having had a nervous breakdown, with the intent of murdering her and making it look like suicide so they can identify her body as the long-dead wife. Witty was always pretty interesting in films, and no less so here. Foch is a little less interesting, but does okay...sometimes it seems as if she is sleepwalking...but I don't mean that in terms of the plot. The son is played nastily by George Macready.It's a rather short film, just over and hour, so it moves along at a good pace, and it makes you want to forgive the the unevenness of the script. At least until the ending, which is about as bad as any I've ever seen in a film. Still, it's an interesting suspense film which could have done extremely well with a better director. I'll give it a "7" barely, although the ending made we want to drop it to a "6".

Robert J. Maxwell As Julia Ross, a young Nina Foch is the mostly rootless American in London who is hired by a nefarious mother and son, Dame May Witty and George Macready, as a secretary. On her first visit, she's drugged and awakens two days later in a stone mansion in Cornwall. Her clothes and ID have been destroyed and she's been given a new identity. She finds she is now Mrs. Marian Hughes, Macready's wife.She's kept from leaving, held prisoner, in fact, and soon learns that the Hughes plan to kill her and make it look like suicide because, in fact, Macready, a madman, has already stabbed his real wife to death and disposed of her body in the sea. This leaves something of a hole in the social fabric and they're going to plug it with Foch's fake suicide.It's a short movie. It really resembles one of the mystery radio dramas that were popular at the time of its release, with names like "The Whistler" and "Inner Sanctum." Nina Foch is a decent actress with pleasant, even features, but not a stunning beauty in the usual Hollywood tradition. She doesn't have the kind of face you want to fall into, but rather paint, or at least run your fingers over and tweak. George Macready, whatever his role, always comes across as more or less the same character -- a Prussian officer with a smooth voice and a face with a Schmiss from sabre fights in a Heidelberg gym. Dame May Witty is much better at likable roles instead of villainy. She was most enjoyable as the lady who vanished on Hitchcock's train. Oddly, I recall the day she died, 29 May, 1948, because I have a flashbulb memory of myself in childhood reading her obit on a sunny afternoon in the New York Daily News, and wondering who she was. Now that my brain is turning into tofu, I intend leaving it for analysis to the American Culinary Institute.The plot is pretty much by the numbers. It was remade, I think, in 1976 with Mary Steenburgen. The first time I was aware of a similar tale -- a young woman hired at an isolated estate and being passed off as someone else -- was in Conan-Doyle's "The Copper Beeches." A seasoned mystery writer could have knocked out this plot as fast as he could type. It was merely a matter of setting up the situation and then figuring out the many ways she could try convincing others that she was sane, not nuts, and how many ways she could try but fail at communicating clues to possibly helpful figures from outside her prison. I counted three important notes from her or from a friend -- notes that would have ended the mystery pronto -- that were intercepted and ripped up.Yet, withal, it's tautly written and enjoyable if you are looking for a diversion. Happily, it's only a bit more than one hour long.

blanche-2 Nina Foch insists that "My Name is Julia Ross" in this 1945 film noir also starring Dame May Witty and George Macready. It's short, and because it is, the film suffers. It could have stood to have been a good fifteen minutes to a half hour longer.When I was growing up, Foch was a fixture on television, playing a neurotic woman, the wife with the cheating husband, the nervous wreck. She became one of the great acting teachers in Los Angeles. Here, she's a pretty young ingenue playing the title role. Julia answers an ad for a secretary and is hired immediately by Mrs. Hughes and her son Ralph. Little does she know - though we learn immediately - that the employment agent is a front, set up to get just the right woman for this assignment, a woman with no family and no boyfriend.It's a live-in situation; once Julia gets to the house, she's drugged, and when she wakes up, she's told she's Mrs. Hughes and not allowed to leave.The acting is very good. Low budget but still entertaining - some things, particularly at the end, happen way too quickly, which is why I said the movie is too short. Nevertheless, I recommend it.