I, Jane Doe
Directed by John H. Auer
Written by Lawrence Kimball
1948/US
Republic Pictures
IMDb page
First viewing/Amazon Prime rental
Bigamy, n. A mistake in taste for which the wisdom of the future will adjudge a punishment called trigamy. — Ambrose Bierce.
Kind of fun to see a courtroom drama with an all female defense team.
Jane Doe (Vera Ralson) shot and killed Eve Meredith Curtis’s (Ruth Hussey) husband Stephen (John Carroll). She has refused to reveal her name or talk about the crime in any way. She is swiftly convicted and given the death sentence. She gets a brief reprieve to give birth to a baby.
Eve, a successful attorney, takes an interest in her and gets the full story. Stephen met Annette Du Bois in France during WWII after his plane crashed. She sheltered him and he married her even though he was already married to Eve. We learn that he is a serial philanderer.
Eve manages to get her a new trial and the story continues to play out through the testimony and flashbacks. With Gene Lockhart as the bombastic prosecutor.
I don’t know that I have seen Vera Ralston before. She is an appealing actress with a delicate beauty. Ruth Hussey was also quite good. John Carroll is the weak link. It’s an entertaining movie but nothing I would go out of my way to see again.
This is a beautifully photographed late noir and the cast and script are both fantastic. Bogarde’s face is so wonderful. It is extremely expressive but also does the empty dead-eyed gaze of pure evil amazingly well. Recommended.
Bogart is very good in this picture, which he did not want to make. We would not see him this angry and haunted until “In a Lonely Place” (1950). He also becomes increasingly paranoid as the story progresses. Greenstreet always plays Greenstreet and he is extremely good at it. The plot relies on increasingly improbable and contrived elements that drag the film down. It is not a who done it but a what happened. There is some nice noir cinematography courtesy of Merritt B. Gerstad.
For me, neither the plot nor the actors are the high spots of the movie. It is the sumptuous reconstruction of 1920’s dress and furnishings and the gorgeous color photography by Jack Cardiff that carried me away. To add to my enjoyment, the locations brought back memories of a cruise my husband and I took down the Nile many years ago.
The first thing I noticed about this film was its sparkling dialogue. The film is based on a P.G. Wodehouse novel and I imagine they lifted pages worth of the great man’s dialogue. It’s kind of a preposterous plot but surely that should be expected.
