Hedy Lamarr is a high-living, high-loving, headstrong photo editor for a magazine. Of course, this means she is deeply miserable, as psychiatrist Morris Carnovsky explains to her. This causes her to abandon the high life and live in a Greenwich Village bed-sit, with Marjorie Main her landlord. Another tenant is research doctor Dennis O'Keefe, and they fall in love. She doesn't tell him about her past, which catches up with her, when ex-lover John Loder gets her into his apartment. Eventually, she flees, but he gets killed that night and with her fingerprints all over the place, and her too depressed over O'Keefe being mad at her, she's likely to be hanged.
It's based on the Madeleine Smith case, and on a play by Edward Sheldon and Margaret Ayers Barnes; an MGM production LETTY LYNTON was found to be a plagiarism, and that's probably how former MGM producer Hunt Stromberg came to be producing this, with Robert Stevenson directing. The problem with this version is there's no suspense. We know Miss Lamarr didn't kill Loder; we see the murder scene. Instead, the only question is when will O'Keefe stop being mad at the woman he loves.
This isn't the only movie version of the Madeleine Smith affair. David Lean would direct a better one in 1950, called MADELEINE.
It's based on the Madeleine Smith case, and on a play by Edward Sheldon and Margaret Ayers Barnes; an MGM production LETTY LYNTON was found to be a plagiarism, and that's probably how former MGM producer Hunt Stromberg came to be producing this, with Robert Stevenson directing. The problem with this version is there's no suspense. We know Miss Lamarr didn't kill Loder; we see the murder scene. Instead, the only question is when will O'Keefe stop being mad at the woman he loves.
This isn't the only movie version of the Madeleine Smith affair. David Lean would direct a better one in 1950, called MADELEINE.