This might well be my favourite role for José Ferrer as he portrays the hypnotist charged with treating "Ann" (Gene Tierney). She's a bit of a kleptomaniac and both she and doctor husband "William" (Richard Conte) are determined to find out just what, if anything, is in her past and triggering this behaviour. It's not as if they are poor or that she needs the things she is stealing... Anyway, the clearly manipulative "Korvo" (Ferrer) manages to inveigle his way into the couple's life and offers to help. Next thing, she comes to and discovers a corpse on the adjacent sofa. Did she kill someone? She has no idea and policeman "Colton" (Charles Bickford) isn't convinced by the increasingly far-fetched solutions being offered by an husband determined, at all costs, to see his wife off the hook. Now we have more of an inkling as to who has done what to whom, and why - but we also have to realise that it's all going to be very difficult to prove, even if the pursuing police and "Dr. Sutton" can happen upon any clues to the real solution at all. Otto Preminger takes his time to tell the story and Ben Hecht's under-stated screenplay allows the characters to develop quite intriguingly until what is, admittedly, a really disappointing denouement. For most of this, though, it's a better than average psychological thriller that touches on the embryonic nature of psychology as both a branch of medicine as well as being a tool for criminal detection.
