“I cannot remember anything about this picture,” Otto Preminger once said, with a mixture of self-deprecation and utter contempt for his interviewer. Which is ironic, since it's one of his best. Ann Sutton (Gene Tierney, owner of one of cinema's sexiest overbites) has a shoplifting problem, and help arrives in the form of hypnotist David Korvo (JosĂ© Ferrer), who convinces the store where she's caught to drop all charges and leave her in his care. Hypnotism seems to be the cure-all, until Ann gets into even hotter water—emerging from a trance next to a dead body and charged with a murder she didn't commit. Whirlpool ranks among the most fascinating and least known films of Preminger's Fox period, when he brought his dry, mean poetic eye to bear on a variety of genres.

“In Whirlpool, the very specificity of the seventh art, the mise-en-scène, came across crystal clear, luminously to me. It revealed to us what makes direction an almost exact science.”—Pierre Rissient

Images courtesy of 20TH CENTURY FOX / THE KOBAL COLLECTION