Book Into Film: “Phantom Lady”

(Editor’s note: This is the second installment in a series comparing noteworthy crime, mystery, and thriller novels against their Hollywood feature adaptations—for better or worse.)

By Randal S. Brandt

Book: Phantom Lady, by Cornell Woolrich (as “William Irish”), 1942
Movie: Phantom Lady—Robert Siodmak (director), Bernard C. Schoenfeld (screenplay), 1944

“Robert Siodmak is the greatest director of
film noir. Ever.”—Eddie Muller
“La bonne fée de Siodmak … s’appelle Joan Harrison.”—Hervé Dumont

Film director Robert Siodmak, a German expatriate whose Hollywood career coincided perfectly with the rise of the style of American filmmaking that would eventually be called film noir, has earned his fair share of accolades from movie historians. But, when “Czar of Noir” Eddie Muller declares you the “greatest … ever,” that’s saying something. After a promising early start in his profession, Siodmak left his native Germany in 1933 as Adolf Hitler rose to power. He emigrated first to Paris, where he made several French films between 1933 and 1939, and then to United States, arriving in Los Angeles in 1940. Working within the Hollywood studio system, his initial American efforts were a series of forgettable B-pictures made first for Paramount and then for Universal. But it was at Universal that Siodmak’s fortunes finally took a positive turn. In her landmark, 1998 biography of this director’s life and career, Deborah Lazaroff Alpi wrote:

[Siodmak] was beginning to feel somewhat downcast at the thought that his career would develop no further, that he would be doomed to bread-and-butter pictures for the rest of his life. But it was at this point that he met someone who would change forever the course of his life and his work. Her name was Joan Harrison.

Siodmak’s previous biographer (in 1981), film historian Hervé Dumont, went so far as to call Joan Harrison the director’s fairy godmother.

And the picture that set the course for both Siodmak’s and Harrison’s groundbreaking careers was Phantom Lady.

If Robert Siodmak was a master of film noir, Cornell Woolrich was equally a master of noir novels and stories. He knew how to toss a character into an impossible situation, light the fuse, and then take him or her to hell and back. In Phantom Lady, published under Woolrich’s nom de plume William Irish, the reader knows from the chapter titles alone that the fuse has already been lit and that it’s going to burn fast—Chapter 1 is called “The Hundred and Fiftieth Day Before the Execution” and Chapter 22 is “The Hour of the Execution,” for goodness sake!

(Right) Phantom Lady, J.G. Lippincott Company, 1942.

The novel starts, 150 days before the execution, when Scott Henderson—who had quarreled with his wife just before they were due to head out for the evening—goes into a saloon with a sour look on his face, orders a Scotch, and sits down next to a woman at the bar. The first and, as it turns out, only thing he notices about her is her chapeau.

The unusual thing about her was the hat. It resembled a pumpkin, not only in shape and size but in color. It was a flaming orange, so vivid it almost hurt the eyes. It seemed to light up the whole bar, like a low-hanging garden-party lantern. Stemming from the exact center of it was a long thin cockerel feather, sticking straight up like the antenna of an insect.
Not one woman in a thousand would have braved that color. She not only did, but got away with it. She looked startling, but good, not funny.

Impulsively, Henderson invites this woman to have dinner with him and then attend a show. She agrees, but before they leave the bar they make a pact: no names, no addresses, no personal details about each other. They are just “two people seeing a show together, companions for an evening.” They take a cab to a restaurant, have dinner, then go to a nightclub to see Estela Mendoza, “the South American sensation.” It’s there that Henderson’s companion catches the attention of the orchestra drummer. She also catches the attention, and not in a good way, of Mendoza, who appears on stage wearing the exact same hat as hers! After the show ends, Henderson and the woman return to the bar where they met, have a nightcap, and go their separate ways.

But when Henderson returns to his apartment, the cops are there, waiting for him. His wife, Marcella, has been found murdered, strangled with one of Henderson’s neckties. Naturally, Henderson is the prime suspect in his wife’s slaying. Yet he has an alibi! The police know the time of Marcella’s death, and it was the precise time he was at the bar meeting that woman in the odd hat. She can prove he didn’t do it … if only he knew what her name was, where she lived, what she looked like … Alas, all he can remember is that hat.

Scott Henderson makes a perfect murder suspect. He had asked Marcella for a divorce; she refused. He actually was having an affair, and in order for him to be with the woman he really loved, he needed to be free from the one he was married to. Unfortunately for him, the mysterious lady who could alibi him has vanished, and everyone who Henderson can remember interacting with that fateful night remembers him, alone; no one claims to recall his companion at all.

Following his trial, he is convicted and sentenced to die in the electric chair. No surprise, really. Remember the countdown chapter titles?

Phantom Lady in paperback (left to right): From Pocket Books, 1944, with cover art by Leo Manso (later famous for his collages); Graphic Mystery, 1955, with an uncredited illustration; and Ace Books, 1968, featuring a cover painting by Stan Hunter.

Afterward, though, Henderson is visited by Inspector Burgess, the lead homicide detective in his case, who only found evidence to convict him, but none to exonerate him. Regardless, Burgess has become convinced that Henderson is innocent—a guilty man, he reasons, would have done a much better job of alibi-ing himself. Unable to do anything more for Henderson, at least officially, Burgess convinces him that he should appeal to his best friend, John Lombard, to continue searching for the phantom lady. Burgess also enlists Henderson’s girlfriend, Carol Richman, to conduct a parallel investigation.

Yet every time John or Carol get close to someone who—finally—admits to seeing Henderson and the mystery woman together on the night in question, that witness ends up dead. Clearly the murderer is somewhere nearby, making sure that Henderson stays in the frame. Slowly—at times excruciatingly slowly—they get nearer and nearer to tracing the unidentified woman, and when the real murderer is finally revealed, it is shocking. But has that killer been found too late?

(Above) Thomas Gomez, Ella Raines, and Franchot Tone.

The novel was such a commercial success that Universal Pictures acquired it and lined it up to be the studio’s first noir film (although the term “film noir” hadn’t been coined yet). It was also the first noir to be directed by German émigré Robert Siodmak and the first film produced by Joan Harrison. Harrison had started her motion-picture career in 1933 as Alfred Hitchcock’s secretary, but she quickly advanced up the ranks to become a screenwriter (at the 1941 Academy Awards she was double-nominated for Oscars for her work on Rebecca and Foreign Correspondent) and Hitchcock’s most trusted advisor outside of his wife, Alma Reville. In 1943, after she had left Hitchcock and struck out on her own, Harrison adapted Woolrich’s novel Phantom Lady and pitched it to Universal. Although it initially rejected her treatment, Universal later changed course and offered her the opportunity to produce it herself—making her the first female producer at a major Hollywood studio.

(Left) Joan Harrison at Universal, 1943.

According to Christina Lane, in her 2020 biography of Harrison (also titled, not-so-coincidentally, Phantom Lady), it was she who changed the narrative focus of the film by placing Carol Richman at the center of the story. In the film version, Scott Henderson (Alan Curtis) is an engineer and Carol (now nicknamed “Kansas,” and played by Ella Raines) is his secretary. Kansas is in love with Henderson—a fact of which he is utterly oblivious here—and determined to do everything she can to exonerate him. The majority of this black-and-white film follows Kansas’ investigations, as she relentlessly tries to extract the truth from people Henderson saw on the night of his wife’s demise: the bartender, the drummer, the nightclub singer, the hat-maker, and, finally, the elusive phantom lady herself. Another major shift from the novel is the revelation of the killer’s identity. It’s no spoiler to tell you that it is Franchot Tone, the film’s top-billed star, who plays Henderson’s friend Jack Marlow (renamed from John Lombard in the novel). However, the audience does not yet know who he is when he arrives in his introductory scene and basically announces “It’s me. I did it.” This revelation turns the narrative from a whodunit (which the novel carries out to the very end) to a howcatchem. Kansas and Burgess (Thomas Gomez), of course, still have no clue, so the audience knows more than they do, and Siodmak keeps the tension building until the nerve-wracking climax.

The official, 1944 trailer for Phantom Lady.

Although the screenplay is credited solely to Bernard C. Schoenfeld, Joan Harrison really deserved at least a share of recognition for its writing. (Universal offered her either screenwriting or producing credit, but not both. She wisely chose producer.) Schoenfeld’s scripting experience up to that point was in radio and he had never tried his hand at a motion-picture screenplay before. Author Lane surmises that hiring Schoenfeld actually worked to Harrison’s benefit, as she could guide and shape the screenplay in the way she wanted it, without much pushback from her novice scribe. As a radio writer, Schoenfeld’s contributions played to his strength—dialogue. As the film’s producer, it was also Harrison who hired Robert Siodmak to direct Phantom Lady, setting him on his course to becoming one of film noir’s greatest directors—and Eddie Muller’s favorite.

Cornell Woolrich’s strength as a crime writer was in devising setups that placed characters in seemingly impossible situations. He was also very good at tying everything up at the end, pulling all the plot threads together and leaving the reader satisfied, if not exhausted. However, he frequently had trouble in the middle. The book version of Phantom Lady is no exception. There are long sections of exposition and monologue that sometimes seem like they are going on forever without moving anything forward. The film does not have that problem. At a brisk 87-minute running time, there is no room for lengthy diversions. The casting is also spot-on, with Ella Raines (in her first featured role) stunning as Kansas, Franchot Tone suitably creepy as Marlow, and Alan Curtis sympathetic as Henderson. Elisha Cook Jr. also turns in a terrific cameo as the frenetic trap drummer. And, doing her best Carmen Miranda impression as the nightclub singer, Estela Monteiro (renamed from Mendoza), is Aurora Miranda—Carmen’s sister!

Two set pieces in the movie are taken directly from the novel. The first shows us Carol/Kansas, during her independent investigation, staking out the bartender who served Henderson and the mystery woman, and who now claims to only remember Henderson alone. After several nights of her sitting quietly in the saloon, constantly staring at him and then following him home after closing time, the stakeout finally ends tragically, inadvertently turning Carol into another of Woolrich’s avenging “black angels.” In the film version of this sequence, the direction and camera work (by ace cinematographer Woody Bredell) are top-notch; in particular, the scene of Kansas trailing the barkeep onto a deserted subway platform absolutely drips “noir.”

Here’s the jazz-club cellar scene from Phantom Lady, showcasing Elisha Cook Jr. (remember him from The Maltese Falcon?) as a sexually-charged drummer. 

The second is one of the most famous (infamous?) scenes in all of film noir. In the novel, Henderson had testified that while attending the nightclub act, his companion had drawn the persistent, unwanted notice of the drummer in the orchestra. Set on getting that drummer, whose name is Cliff Milburn, to admit he’d seen the lady in the orange hat, Carol dresses provocatively, sits in his direct line of sight, and flirts with him while he plays. After the performance, she lets him take her out. When he proposes accompanying her to a late-night jam session, she initially hesitates. “Come on, you don’t want to miss this, snooks,” Milburn urges. When they reach the basement where the band is playing, Woolrich makes it clear that the musicians are all stoned, with marijuana smoke “filling the air with haze and flux.” This time Carol’s plan actually works. Milburn finally breaks down and admits that he had watched the lady in the hat and had later been paid $500 by somebody to forget that fact if the cops asked about it.

When Siodmak shot this scene, he subverted the Motion Picture Production Code censors by playing down the drug angle. In the movie, Kansas and Cliff rendezvous after the show and Cliff asks, “You dig jive?” “You bet,” she replies, “I’m a hep kitten.” Arriving at the jam session, they find the drummer-less band already in full swing. There are open bottles all around, and smoke in the air, yet there is no hint that it is anything illicit. But were the censors so focused on the reefers that they completely missed the orgasmic frenzy that Elisha Cook Jr., as Cliff, works himself into behind his drum kit, with Ella Raines seductively egging him on?

(Right) Author Cornell Woolrich.

Phantom Lady is a great example of a novel and the film based upon it that both stand the test of time. Although key changes were made to Woolrich’s yarn, most of them work very well on the big screen. And many of the essential elements from Woolrich’s book remain intact. The only creative change in the cinematic version that is hard to understand is the decision to ignore Woolrich’s description of the hat—especially as it was featured prominently in the cover design of the original novel. To be sure, the headwear in the movie is large, gaudy, and hard-to-miss. But it is no orange pumpkin. Surely, some Hollywood milliner could have made something that resembled the novel’s version, even if the color would have been lost in a black-and-white film.

The Hollywood adaptation of Phantom Lady was a breakthrough in numerous ways. As an early example of dark and suspenseful storytelling and chiaroscuro cinematography, it provided a blueprint for the further development of film noir. It showed Hollywood that Cornell Woolrich was a reliable source of original material (reaching a high-water mark in 1954 when Hitchcock adapted one of his short stories as Rear Window). And it gave Ella Raines, according to film noir scholar Imogen Sara Smith, “her defining, and perhaps her greatest role, allowing her to try on several personae while playing a distaff version of the white knight detective pounding the mean streets.”

Perhaps most significant of all, though, was the impact this motion picture had on the future careers of Robert Siodmak and Joan Harrison, he as a director (The Killers, Criss Cross) and she as a producer (Ride the Pink Horse, Alfred Hitchcock Presents). In 2015, Eddie Muller echoed Dumont’s assessment of the mutual benefits they gained from this collaboration: “With [the] 1944 release [of Phantom Lady], Joan Harrison not only helped foster the film noir movement, she set the course of Siodmak’s career. From then on he was synonymous with moody, psychologically complex thrillers—competing with Hitchcock throughout the 1940s for the mantle ‘Master of Suspense.’”

Phantom Lady can be streamed for free from the Internet Archive.

SOURCES
Alpi, Deborah Lazaroff. Robert Siodmak: A Biography, with Critical Analyses of His Films Noirs and a Filmography of All His Works. McFarland & Company, 1998.
Dumont, Hervé. Robert Siodmak: Le maître du film noir. Editions
L’Age d’Homme, 1981.
“Eddie Muller on Robert Siodmak.” Phantom Lady, DVD. Turner
Classic Movies, 2012.
Lane, Christina. Phantom Lady: Hollywood Producer Joan Harrison, the Forgotten Woman Behind Hitchcock. Chicago Review Press, 2020.
Muller, Eddie. “Murder, She Made: The Exceptional Career of Joan Harrison.” Noir City Annual 8 (2015): 88-101.
Smith, Imogen Sara. “A Light in the Dark: Ella Raines and Film Noir’s Working Girls.” Noir City Annual 8 (2015): 103-111.
Terrall, Ben. “Book vs. Film: Phantom Lady,” Noir City Annual 8
(2015): 226-229.