The opening minutes of 1957’s She Played with Fire are like a dream and that’s because, well…it turns out to be a dream. We first see a metronome in action, before its arm transitions to a windshield wiper going across a car windshield on a stormy night. Next, we’re floating through the heavy front doors of a mansion, as if we are a ghost. The floor is shrouded by fog. There is a painting on a wall in the distance. As the cameras pushes in on that, the door of the house in that painting opens. Then a sudden jump cut to a limp hand, presumably that of a corpse.
One would be lead to believe this is gothic horror, when it is really noir. It is closer to Double Indemnity than Rebecca. Jack Hawkins plays an insurance investigator who is called to a mansion to investigate a fire claim in which an old, valuable painting was destroyed. The claimant is played by Dennis Price as an asthmatic who, inexplicably, always seems to be smoking. I wondered if doctors back then were prescribing menthol-eucalyptus cigarettes for that illness. Arlene Dahl plays his wife, whom Hawkins had a romantic past with when they were in Hong Kong. Price nearly forces them together, sending Hawkins to attend the symphony with her in his absence.
Parallel to this is another and, at first, seemingly unrelated claim being investigated by Hawkins. Christopher Lee makes an early appearance as an actor who claims to have been injured, forcing a delay in a film production, which initiates a claim against the completion insurance. In the course of his research, he pays a visit to the apartment of Greta Gynt, Lee’s alibi for the claim. It is in that apartment that Hawkins spies a painting over the mantel which appears to be one supposedly destroyed in that fire. Complicating things even further, Gynt’s American fiancée claims to have bought that painting, meaning he is lying. That, or one of the two paintings is a forgery.
There’s a pretty interesting sequence about how to detect forged artworks. Not sure why I do this, but I found myself taking mental notes on such information as the tendency of crooks to make the cracks in reproductions too prominent.
Hawkins returns to the mansion, only to find it empty and the furniture covered. A test he was taught by an expert reveals the paintings are, indeed, forgeries. He happens to find the still body of Price in the house right before it catches fire. The smell of cigarette smoke leads him to a freshly extinguished cigarette in an ashtray. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and there just happens to be an inferno started in the basement. It is quite a roaring fire, and it feels very dangerous, even though you know it was filmed in a tightly controlled environment.
In the end, She Played with Fire proves to be excessively convoluted while somehow being simultaneously a bit too simple. A great deal happens here, but much of it feels like unnecessary clutter that tries to make a rather pedestrian story feel more complex. I am surprised this was the work of Sidney Gilliat, who also wrote and directed one of my favorite films, Green for Danger. Gilliat doesn’t bring his “A” game to this production, but this is still a pleasant enough of a diversion.
Dir: Sidney Gilliat
Starring Jack Hawkins, Arlene Dahl, Dennis Price
Watched as part of Mill Creek’s blu-ray box set Film Noir Archives Volume 3: 1957-1960