The File on Thelma Jordon

Six years after cementing her status as one of classical Hollywood’s preeminent interpreters of the femme fatale archetype in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, Barbara Stanwyck joined forces with Siodmak for his ninth American noir, produced while the director was out on loan to Paramount nearly a decade into his contract with Universal. Happily married assistant district attorney Cleve Marshall (Wendell Corey) strikes up a drunken flirtation with the glamorous, enigmatic Thelma Jordon (Stanwyck) when she arrives unannounced at his office one night to report a break-in attempt at the well-appointed home of her elderly aunt Vera (Gertrude W. Hoffmann), for whom Thelma serves as live-in companion. Just as Thelma, initially reluctant to indulge Cleve’s advances, is beginning to warm up to them, Vera is found murdered—and Thelma, her sole inheritor, is fingered as the prime suspect. Working from an economical yet emotionally potent screenplay by Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Ketti Frings, Siodmak and his stars deploy this classic genre premise to uniquely unsettling effect, imbuing each narrative twist and turn with an air of tragic, heartbreaking inevitability.