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The spiritual father of Film Noir is probably writer Cornell Woolrich. His bleak, exquisitely plotted suspense novels from the forties seem to summarize everything that makes Film Noir distinctive, haunted, as they are, by an ever-present pall of doom. Woolrich's novels are filled with men upon whom the finger of fate has descended, often delivered to their doom by an annihilating angel of vengeance, the belle dame sans merci , the femme fatale. The avenging angel motif even leaks over into those books whose protagonists are female. Phantom Lady, as written by Woolrich's famous pseudonym, William Irish, is such a book.

A man has an argument with his wife. He storms out of the house and goes to a bar to drink it off. There, he meets a woman--attractive, but anonymous; Woolrich describers her face as a "Gallup poll"--and spends the evening with her. When he returns home, he discovers that his wife has been murdered and that he is the prime suspect. When he sends the cops out to corroborate his alibi, the woman can't be found and no one ever remembers seeing her. He is convicted of his wife's murder and sentenced to death. His secretary believes in her boss's innocence (she is secretly in love with him) and sets out to prove it before he is taken to the electric chair.

Like all of Woolrich's novels, the plot is the heart and soul of things. Oddly enough, the plots are usually discarded by filmmakers when they translate them into movies. The plot of Robert Siodmak's version of Phantom Lady is surprisingly close to the text, which makes it one of the few really satisfying film versions of Woolrich's work. Oh, Siodmak cleans things up here and there to suit the Hays Code and trims away some of the incidental scenes, but the engine that drives the book is recognizable as the same engine that drives the movie. What Siodmak adds to the mix is the visual poetry of Film Noir. This is elegantly filmed in high contrast black and white and provides imagery to suit the book's doom-haunted scenarios. There is a shot of an empty train platform, for instance, that has more menace than your average haunted house. The movie is a panoply of deep shadows. The supporting cast is uniformly excellent, but the film belongs to Ella Raines as our heroine, desperately searching for the Phantom Lady, entering the lives of some of the suspects and destroying some of them.  While the ending of the film doesn't completely ambush the viewer the way the novel does, the resolution is satisfying the way the end of a really good B-picture should be.

One final note: When our heroes finally catch up to the "phantom lady," she is referred to only as "Miss Terry." Woolrich didn't think of that, which is too bad for him, 'cause it's the only name that really suits her....