Review
No matter how pretentious the cocktail party never escape by asking another wallflower out for dinner. That was theatrical producer Van Heflins mistake when on the terrace of Broadway diva Ginger Rogers apartment he took pity on hopeful young writer Peggy Ann Garner. Just a few months later she was found hanged in the bathroom of his apartment.
It was all very innocent though. While his wife another star on the Rialto (Gene Tierney) was away tending to her ailing mother Heflin let Garner use his place as a daytime office so she could write in quiet comfort. (Well not so quiet She listens to The Dance of the Seven Veils from Salome incessantly and fixates on a line from the opera The mystery of love is stronger than the mystery of death.) But when it turns out not only that she was pregnant but that she was murdered the police sensibly enough find in Heflin their prime suspect.
Black Widow written and directed by Nunnally Johnson assembles an impressive array of Hollywood luminaries across whose resumés long shadows were beginning to creep. Along with Rogers Tierney and Heflin theres George Raft as a police detective Otto Krueger as Garners actor uncle and Reginald Gardiner as Rogers whipped spouse. Its an ensemblecast 40shighstyle mystery movie made about a decade too late but not too much the worse for that (even allowing for its color and Cinemascope).
Heflins technically the center of the movie – the patsy racing around to prove his innocence. But the meatier parts go to the women except for Tierney all but wasted in the recessive role of the elegant but dutiful wife. Garner makes her abrupt exit early in the movie but returns in startlingly revisionist flashbacks. And as the grande dame (named Carlotta perhaps in homage to another grande dame of the stage Marie Dresslers Carlotta Vance in Dinner at Eight) Rogers strides around in bigticket outfits and fakes a highfalutin dramaqueen accent. For most of the movie it seems like illfitting role for the essentially proletarian Rogers but its shrewdly written and near the end she shows her true colors becoming briefly sensational.
Like Repeat Performance and All About Eve Black Widow uncoils in a highstrung backstabbing theatrical milieu thats now all but vanished – all the money and the glamour have moved west. (Not to put too fine a point on it but the tiny part of a struggling Greenwich Village actor is taken by television producer Aaron Spelling now one of the richest men in Hollywood.) The movie cheats a little by withholding information essential to our reading of the characters but its a forgivable feint the characters are all types anyhow. There is however one baffling omission – theres not a single widow in the plot.