Stage Fright is an Alfred Hitchcock suspense movie.
(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)
Jane Wyman is Eve Gill an acting student who is in love with Jonathan Cooper. Unfortunately, Jonathan is in love with Charlotte Inwood (played by Marlene Dietrich) who unfortunately is married to a man she doesn’t love. One day Jonathan comes to Eve and asks her for her help. He tells her that Charlotte came to his apartment in a dress covered in blood and told him that her husband started beating her and in self-defense she killed him with a fireplace poker. She asked Jonathan to go back to the scene of the crime to get her a clean dress. But while he was there the maid saw him and called the police.
Jonathan asks Eve to help him hide from the police until he can figure out how to escape from the trap, he has found himself in. Eve enlists the help of her father “Commodore Gill (played by Alistair Sim) who owns a boat that Jonathan hides on. Meanwhile Eve goes to Charlotte’s home to see what the police are up to. While snooping around she meets police detective Wilfred Smith (Michael Wilding) who happens to be working on the case and she proceeds to fall in love with him. She also manages to insinuate herself into Charlotte’s household by impersonating a relative of Charlotte’s maid and theatrical dresser. In this role she discovers that Charlotte has no intention of disrupting her life but instead expects Jonathan to flee the country permanently.,
Meanwhile Jonathan sneaks into the theater where Charlotte is playing and confronts her. She explains that she will not be joining him in permanent exile and he reacts by saying he has the bloody dress and he might give it to the police if he has to.
Finally, Eve and her father arrange for the police to eavesdrop on Charlotte being confronted about the bloody dress in a fake blackmail conversation with Eve. But in the conversation Charlotte states that even though there is blood on her dress Jonathan murdered her husband in front of her. Meanwhile Inspector Smith has captured Jonathan at Eve’s home and he has been brought to the theater for questioning. He breaks loose and Eve helps him hide in the theater basement with her. While this is going on Smith reveals to Eve’s father that Jonathan is actually a dangerous maniac who has killed before.
While hiding with Eve, Jonathan confesses to Eve that he did indeed murder Charlotte’s husband more or less at her instigation. He also admits that he previously killed another man, but was cleared based on self-defense grounds. And then he hinted that he would be executed for this new murder unless he was thought completely insane. And the only way he could think of convincing a jury of that would be if he killed another person for no reason at all. Now Eve sensed her personal danger and she tells Jonathan that they must escape the building before the police got down into the basement. And as he walked through a door ahead of her, she locked it behind him and screamed to the police to capture Jonathan. Jonathan was now on the stage and trying to escape so the police dropped the heavy fire curtain (actually a heavy metal sheet) to trap him but just as he reached the edge of the stage he tripped and the steel curtain crushed and killed him.
Great Caesar’s ghost, I’m exhausted just reciting that plot. And I left several subplots and characters out. There’s Charlotte’s manager that she’s having an affair with and Charlotte’s mother who is estranged from her father and Eve’s friends, one of whom is played by Hitchcock’s daughter, and on and on. It’s a bit much. Plus, Dietrich sings several songs and that maybe okay for her French song but the one in English wasn’t so good. Without a doubt this movie is very odd. I enjoyed it, maybe because of its oddity, but I tend to doubt most people are like me. Let’s say this is for Hitchcock fans who like the theatrical.