The Spiral Staircase
Director: Robert Siodmak
Year Released: 1945
Rating: 3.5
The best kind of woman - a pretty mute (well-played by Dorothy McGuire) - gets stalked by a serial killer who targets women with handicaps (in order to 'purge' the world of the weak). It contains all the elements of classic noir: intense shadows, an endless thunderstorm, a rising body count, warped psychology, lots of suspicious types and standard lines like "There's someone at the door" played with heavy emphasis. What's darkly comical, too, is how so many characters joke to the McGuire character about how she's 'probably next' to be killed, while she remains helpless in almost every way. Hitchcock gets name-checked a lot in various reviews of this, but I was actually reminded of Fritz Lang's work.
