Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

successful young civil engineer, went on the night he was arrested and accused of having
strangled his wife with his own necktie. On that night, he explains, he went out to this bar,
and picked up a woman and persuaded her to join him in going to a musical show. Part of
their arrangement was that they would not reveal their names to each other (she thus
becomes the phantom lady of the film), so all he knows about her is that she was wearing a
flamboyant hat which was identical to the one that the lead Latin American singer in the
show was wearing. Henderson is then convicted and sentenced to die in eighteen days. It is
up to his devoted secretary, Carol “Kansas” Richman (Ella Raines), who strongly believes
in his innocence, to initiate an investigation of her own.
Figure 46. Phantom Lady Figure 47. Phantom Lady
Phantom Lady suggests an awkward version of the type of urban spaces found in
the Weimar street film (see p. 103), both claustrophobic (a city with hot sizzling streets,
with details of threatening shadows) and seductively decadent, with jazz emanating from
low-class bars, and the click of high heels on the pavement. The jazz nightclub represents a
place exploiting the popular association of jazz with death, drugs, and sex, while jazz’s
own improvisional qualities could be conceived in terms of the Freudian “unconscious”.
The two shots above (figs. 46 and 47) show Cliff March (Elisha Cook, Jr.) and “Kansas” in
a jazz cellar scene, and the whole scene moves so quickly that it almost spins off into the
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