Monday, October 13, 2025

Revoir Paris (2022): “A Diamond in Trauma”

I loved Revoir Paris. I must confess, however, that I have never heard anyone describe it as a noir. It does contain elements that are common to noir, going all the way back to its beginnings in the 1940s: murder, amnesia, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). These noir elements happen in a very different setting for Revoir Paris, a very modern one: a mass shooting. I decided to write about the film because it captures the noir feature of PTSD so well. And it is a great film.

This article about Revoir Paris contains many spoilers. It also discusses a film whose plot could be triggering for people suffering from PTSD. The director Alice Winocour based her fictional story on the experiences of her brother, who survived the November 2015 attacks in France when he was attending a concert at the Bataclan theater in Paris. Viewers will have to make their own decisions about seeing the film, but it is meant to be an homage to the human capacity to survive. Sara, a character in the film, a trauma survivor, and the organizer of a support group, tells Mia Loreau, another trauma survivor and the main character of Revoir Paris, that “a diamond in trauma” is a way to come to terms with tragedy and horror. In the midst of all the pain and suffering, there is still something good, something to hope for.

The film starts with a slow dolly of the camera toward the open door of a balcony in a Paris apartment. Mia Loreau waters plants on the balcony and then crosses the threshold to enter the apartment. The camera continues zooming in on the scene outside the balcony door, leaving everything about the apartment building behind and showcasing the neighborhood. Like the film’s title, it lets viewers know that Paris is as much a character in the story as the actors. In the kitchen, Mia gets ready for work as a Russian translator. Her partner, Vincent, a doctor, does the same. The day starts just as any other for them.

After work, Mia and Vincent go out for dinner. Vincent takes a phone call, and he returns to the table to tell Mia that he must go back to work. Mia is left to finish her meal on her own. She doesn’t return to her apartment right away because it starts pouring rain while she is driving her motorcycle home. To wait out the thunderstorm, she stops at L’Étoile d’Or for a drink. The brasserie is crowded, and she is seated at a table in a back room. Mia has a glass of wine and does some journal writing. Her fountain pen starts leaking, and she has to go to the restroom to wash her hands. She notices other patrons around her, in the restroom and in the dining room, including a man celebrating his birthday at a nearby table with a group of friends. He catches her eye. All these details become important later, when Mia’s memory comes back in pieces, and she must come to terms with her recovery.

Mia gets up to leave the restaurant and allows two other patrons to proceed before her. As they near the front door of the brasserie, the man and the woman are shot dead. Mia drops to the floor and tries to hide. From this spot, she can see the assassin enter the brasserie and methodically shoot random patrons, really anyone who is still moving. She plays dead to escape being shot, and when the assassin moves to another room in the brasserie, Mia starts crawling.

And then the screen goes black.

After a few seconds, the screen is filled with an overhead shot of La Place de la République at night. Viewers can see the streets coming together at this monument and traffic making its way around the traffic circle surrounding it. It is unclear at first whether Mia is still alive, but then her voice on the soundtrack explains that she cannot remember anything past the point when the screen goes black, when she is crawling on the floor of the brasserie. She continues talking over the shot of La Place de la République, which is another way to showcase the city of Paris. The film is about thirteen minutes long at this point, and the rest of it is devoted to Mia’s recovery and that of other survivors.

Mia is physically scarred from her injuries in the shooting. She tells her plastic surgeon that she wants to get her reconstructive surgery over with so that she can move on, but the surgeon tells her that they have to wait because a procedure now risks infection. During their brief conversation, Mia reveals that she is back in Paris for the first time after spending three months at her mother’s home recuperating. On her way home from the surgeon’s, Mia’s bus takes a chance detour past L’Étoile d’Or, and Mia disembarks to visit the brasserie. Perhaps she is ready to recapture her lost memories.

Mia’s friends and her partner Vincent don’t know what to say to her. They wonder when she will get back to her old self. In the meantime, she has flashbacks. Sometimes she sees the patrons from L’Étoile d’Or: they are silent, but they appear as though they are part of her life. Mia tells Vincent that people used to confide in her; now they hold back. They don’t know what to say. She tells Vincent that he treats her differently now, too, since the night of the shooting. It’s as if he is trying to be careful around her. Vincent insists that Mia is wrong, that what she says is not true, but she says that, yes, it is true.

Mia asks Vincent about the details of their dinner the evening of the shooting. Was it raining or not? He was called away to work, yes? What time was that? She wants to rebuild her memories, but it’s not a project that interests Vincent much. Viewers learn later that it’s not only the understandable gaps in his memory that makes him reticent. He is having an affair with a coworker, which was the reason for his leaving his dinner with Mia in the first place.

When Mia gets off the bus and stops at L’Étoile d’Or for the first time since the shooting, she learns about a trauma support group and meets other survivors of the same night. One is Thomas, who caught Mia’s eye the night of the shooting. He tells Mia that he remembers everything about that night. She eventually reaches out to him to help her. He is not so sure that remembering everything is such a good idea, but he tells her, “You can’t do it alone. It takes two or more to remember.”

Mia meets several other survivors, and all of them experience the pain of tragedy in their own way. Each one has a unique way of coping, and when I started listing their unique coping mechanisms, I began to think of them as the quirks of trauma. Here are a few examples:

Mia takes a seat during her first trauma support group meeting at L’Étoile d’Or, and another attendee, Félicia, asks her to move because it is the same table where her parents were sitting when they were shot and killed. Later in the film, Félicia learns that her parents were in the middle of writing a postcard addressed to her, a postcard of the painting Water Lilies by Claude Monet, when they were killed. Félicia wants to see the original painting, one of the last things that her parents saw when they visited an art museum on the day that they died. She says that it will be “like saying goodbye to them.” Félicia cannot part with anyone unless she is on good terms with them because she knows now that anything can happen.

Thomas is now claustrophobic. He cannot enter L’Étoile d’Or and thus cannot attend the trauma support group meetings. He connects with Mia by motioning to her from his position on the sidewalk outside the brasserie so that she can join him. He also suffers from survivor’s guilt. On the night of the shooting, he was at L’Étoile d’Or celebrating his birthday with coworkers. Two did not survive the shooting.

Another survivor, Camille, confronts Mia and accuses her of saving only herself. Camille says that Mia had the chance to help others by letting them into the bathroom where she had locked herself in, but she did nothing. Later in the film, Camille finally admits to Mia that it was she herself who locked everyone out of the bathroom. She had constructed her own memories of that night because she had just lost her husband in the shooting and was so overpowered by grief that she couldn’t process what was happening to her.

Some of Mia’s memories come back in the form of dreams, when she is asleep. Sometimes they flash before her while she is going about her daily life. Félicia tells Mia that sometimes she thinks that she sees her parents walking on the streets of Paris. Mia understands because she sees some of the victims, too, even though she knew no one in the brasserie the night of the shooting.

Mia’s relationship with her partner Vincent becomes more and more complicated the more she searches for a way to recover and come to terms with what she experienced. She moves out of their apartment into that of a friend’s near La Place de la République. She comes home one night to find Vincent waiting for her at her front door. He tells her that he doesn’t understand what she’s doing, why she won’t come home to the apartment that they share. He offers simplistic explanations: He thinks that she has found someone new or that she would rather be with her support group. He starts packing her things without her consent. Mia tells Vincent that he cannot help her, that she cannot go back to their old life. Vincent asks, “I have to watch you go crazy and do nothing?” He does not understand her feelings or what she is going through, and he does not understand that there is nothing that he can do.

When Mia meets Vincent again in the apartment they shared for a final goodbye, he tells her that she shouldn’t associate the shooting with him and that she wouldn’t leave him if they had had a child together. She tells him that it wouldn’t have changed anything. It was a decision that they had both made, and she doesn’t regret it. When they leave in his car, she asks him directly where he was the night of the shooting. Vincent admits that he was meeting someone that he is having an affair with. Mia and Vincent’s separation may have been inevitable, and Mia’s trauma perhaps hastened it.

Memories slowly come back to Mia, and her persistence, determination, and research pay off. She begins to recall that she hid in a closet with a young man, a chef at L’Étoile d’Or, who held her hand and reassured her. Her search for clues is a rather unconventional detective story, and it could be called another noir feature. The man that Mia is searching for is Assane, an illegal immigrant, which makes tracking him down very difficult. To find him, Mia must enter a world that is very much a part of Paris, but it wasn’t a part of Mia’s life before the shooting. Not many people in this world are willing to talk, but Mia finally gets answers from an employee who stayed employed at the brasserie after the shooting and from a handler who helps immigrants find work. Assane was a chef at the brasserie and happened to be looking for food ingredients in the basement when the shooting started. That chance event saved his life, but many of his friends died that night.

Mia finally finds Assane selling souvenirs near the Eiffel Tower. At first, he pretends that he doesn’t recognize her, but then he admits that he was the one who held her hand. They are happy to find out that both survived and are continuing with their lives. The meeting gives Mia, especially, a sense of closure. She and many of the other survivors feel a need to connect with the people they spent such harrowing moments with. Many offered comfort at a time when they feared for their lives.

The film is realistic in its treatment of recovery after trauma. The pace and timing were true to the subject, which is not often comfortable for survivors or those who care about them—or for viewers of a film. Some reviewers of the film did not like the long pauses, with the camera resting on characters’ faces and their portrayals of emotion, and the slow pace of the action. But the film does not have any fast action; it is not that type of film.

Virginie Efira, in the role of Mia Loreau, carries the film, and her performance is powerful. The actors in supporting roles also give great performances. I saw the film several times, and I was lost in the narrative every time.

The opening and closing credits appear in neon-blue type over a black background, which matches the blue tinge of Paris at night, when Mia often searches for peace and answers. The emphasis on the blue lights of the city works well, as does the soundtrack and sound design. The music is an original score that emphasizes the mood and pace of the narrative.

The DVD that I watched came with features that included interviews with the director, Alice Winocour, and the two lead actors, Virginie Efira and Benoît Magimel. All the features are worth a look to learn more about their creative processes and their approach to creating the story.

As I mentioned earlier, Winocour, based her fictional story on the experiences of her brother, who survived the November 2015 attacks in France when he was at the Bataclan theater in Paris. For more information about the November 2015 attacks in France and about the film, click on the links in the following list:

Wikipedia: general information about the November 2015attacks in France.

Moveable Fest: an interview with Winocour about the film.  

Film Review Daily: a review of Revoir Paris.  

The English-language title for Revoir Paris is Paris Memories, a title that makes the film sound like a love story, a romantic comedy, and it is anything but. The French title literally means To Resee Paris. And I can understand that the literal translation might not have worked very well. Mia Loreau is indeed searching for her memories of a traumatic event, but I might have gone with something like Searching for Memories in Paris.

Revoir Paris captures the reality of life for Mia after she experiences a mass shooting. In her particular case, one could say that she might not have been living her life to the fullest before the trauma because it is only afterward that she faces some hard facts. For instance, she finally has the courage to confront her live-in boyfriend about his affair with one of his coworkers.

I hope Alice Winocour revisits the topic of Revoir Paris and creates another film about tragedy and PTSD. Maybe the topic deserves many films exploring the path to recovery, which takes a lot longer than the time frame suggested in Revoir Paris. I don’t think it was Winocour’s intent to suggest that such horror could be examined and resolved in a few months or in one film. So I do hope that she returns to the subject. I think that she would do great justice to the long-term effects of tragedy and PTSD.

May 21, 2022 (Cannes); September 7, 2022 (France); June 23 2023 (United States) release dates    Directed by Alice Winocour    Screenplay by Alice Winocour, Jean-Stéphane Bron, Marcia Romano    Original music by Anna Von Haussewolff    Edited by Julien Lacheray    Cinematography by Stéphane Fontaine

Virginie Efira as Mia Loreau    Benoît Magimel as Thomas    Grégoire Colin as Vincent    Maya Sansa as Sara    Amadou Mbow as Assane    Nastya Golubeva Carax as Félicia    Anne-Lise Heimburger as Camille    Sokem (aka Kemso) Ringuet as Hakim    Sofia Lesaffre as Nour    Dolores Chaplin as Estelle, Thomas’s wife    Clarisse Makundul Kyé as Essé    Zakaviya Gouran as the plastic surgeon    Johathan Turnbull as the waiter at L’Étoile d’Or

Distributed by Pathé    Produced by Dharamsala, Darius Films, Pathé, France 3 Cinéma

Monday, September 22, 2025

The Tattooed Stranger (1950)

I am adding a new one to my list of film noir favorites: The Tattooed Stranger. For a film that is just a little bit more than an hour long, The Tattooed Stranger packs in a lot of information and entertainment. And if you like history as much as I do, it is also a visual record of New York City as it was in the middle of the twentieth century. I have seen the film several times and found more to like each time. Everything about it is low budget and minimalist, and it all works in its favor.

The film starts with a man walking his dog through Central Park in New York City. The dog leads him to a parked car, and the man is shocked to find a deceased female in the passenger seat. The man rushes to the driver’s side of the car and honks the car horn, which alerts a police officer on horseback. It isn’t long before other officers arrive and surround the vehicle. They question the witness, and homicide detectives and the medical coroner are called to the scene.

The crime scene has a few clues. The car was stolen in the Bronx and reported by the car’s owner. The detectives take fingerprints, a cast of a footprint, samples of all the materials (dirt, grass, vegetation) that they find in the car. However, the woman is a Jane Doe. There is nothing on her person or in her purse to identify her.

Captain Lundquist assigns the case to Lieutenant Corrigan and pairs him with new homicide detective, Frank Tobin. Lundquist is impressed with Tobin: He has a college education and a good war record; he was a military police officer in the army. Lieutenant Corrigan is still a little worried about working with Tobin; he jokes with the captain that his grammar might be too poor to measure up.

Tobin is transferring from his work in the police crime lab, and he is convinced he will miss the work. His boss, Captain Gavin says that they will still be working together on cases but that Tobin shouldn’t put all his faith in modern (1950) criminal science: “Now, look, Tobin, you hang around this place too long and you begin to think that the answer to everything can be found on a microscope slide and spectrograph reading. Oh, those things help. Science can help a lot. But remember, 90 percent of an investigation is still carried on in the inside of a man’s head and the bottom of his feet.”

The medical examiner had already examined the body of Jane Doe when he leaves the examining room, and his completed examination is a lucky break because a man enters and tries to carve up her body. A foot chase ensues inside police headquarters, and the intruder is eventually shot and killed. Lieutenant Corrigan recognizes him: Billy Alcohol, already known to the police because he is always being picked up for public drunkenness. The detectives learn that Billy Alcohol was hired to attack the dead body, and the medical examiner can figure out why. Jane Doe had a tattoo on her wrist, and it is an important clue in a case that has so few.

(This article about The Tattooed Stranger contains spoilers.)

Another important clue is a plant specimen found at the crime scene that Captain Gavin cannot identify. He and Captain Lundquist send Detective Tobin to the Museum of Natural History for some research about it. Lieutenant Corrigan is off to inquire at different restaurants to see if he can find where Jane Doe worked because the medical examiner guessed that she spent most of her days on her feet.

At the Museum of Natural History, Detective Tobin meets Dr. Mary Mahan. He is surprised to learn that the PhD plant specialist is a woman. (It helps to remember that the film was released in 1950, when women were leaving the workforce and giving up jobs for returning service members.) They identify the plant, but Dr. Mahan remembers that additional research on the plant was done at the Botanical Garden. She and Detective Tobin head there next to learn that the unknown plant sample found at the crime scene was once found in a vacant lot on the south corner of Gun Hill Road and Grand Boulevard (in the Bronx, according to my online search; no one says so specifically in the film). These scenes serve another purpose: Detective Tobin and Dr. Mahan are attracted to one another and thus provide a bit of romantic interest in the film—no femme fatale for this film noir.

Lieutenant Corrigan distracts Detective Tobin from his budding romance because he wants Tobin to join him for a tour of what he calls “art galleries,” that is, tattoo parlors, on the Bowery. They need to show the photo they have of Jane Doe’s tattoo to tattoo artists in the hope of finding the artist and perhaps learning the victim’s identity. They finally find Johnny Marseille, who tells the detectives that he recognizes the tattoo. He also recognizes the woman from the photo they have of her dead body on the examiner’s table. He doesn’t know her name, but he remembers that she came with a man, a regular customer named Al Radditz. They got matching tattoos at the time, which he thought was romantic. She came in maybe a year later to have the tattoo altered, which is the one in their photo. Johnny Marseille and the detectives surmise that she and Al Radditz broke up and she found a new boyfriend.

From this point on, the two detectives, Tobin and Corrigan, follow the clues and put in the footwork to solve the case. The work is painstaking, and they follow one detail after another, which means the plot goes from one point to another. Once again, I have to point out that The Tattooed Stranger, like so many films noir, needs careful attention to detail. And it’s easy to miss something. It also helps to do a little bit of research because the film includes many cultural references that film viewers in 1950 would have known and taken for granted. Here are just a few examples of what I mean:

Lieutenant Corrigan gives Detective Frank Tobin the nickname “Luther Burbank” after Captain Gavin sends Tobin to the Museum of Natural History to investigate the plant specimen that cannot be identified. I had no idea who Luther Burbank was and had to look up his name to learn something about him. Luther Burbank (1849–1926) was a U.S. botanist, horticulturist, and agricultural scientist—and he had his own active website! Click here if you want to learn more about him at his own webpage at that site.

Detective Tobin tells Dr. Mahan that his homicide case is in the news, but he is joking. When she asks for proof, he directs her to a comic strip in the newspaper. Dr. Mahan tells Tobin that she will feel like Tess Trueheart if he stands her up for their dinner date. Tess Trueheart was a name I thought was associated with the comic strip Dick Tracy, but it was still a name I had to look up, just to be sure. Tess Trueheart was indeed the girlfriend of Dick Tracy, famous cartoon detective of the Dick Tracy comic strip created by Chester Gould in 1931. Click here for more information at Wikipedia about the list of characters, including Tess Trueheart, in the Dick Tracy universe.

Tobin starts a running gag with Lieutenant Corrigan at the beginning of their murder investigation with the following crack: “I knew a tattooed WAC once.” WAC stands for Women’s Army Corps, created during World War II. The Tattooed Stranger was released in 1950, only five years after the end of the war, and it’s a good bet that U.S. film viewers were intimately familiar with all the nation’s defense forces. Click here to learn more about the WAC at the National WWII Museum.

The running gag about the tattooed WAC is one example of the humor in the film. There is a lot of good-natured fun and comradery among all the police officers and detectives. The humor keeps the homicide investigation from getting too burdensome, for the characters and the viewers!

The on-location shooting in New York City is spectacular. The investigation takes the detectives to Brooklyn, Manhattan, the Bronx; they certainly cover a lot of territory. The film has inadvertently become a great historical film record of New York City in 1950, now seventy-five years ago. (One thing that surprised me a bit was the amount of litter in the streets. The city was not especially clean seventy-five years ago.)

One of the pleasures of seeing the film several times was my increasing appreciation for Walter Kinsella’s portrayal of Lieutenant Corrigan and his relationship with Detective Tobin. Because of these two detectives, The Tattooed Stranger was a buddy cop film before the term was invented. The two share most of the jokes, and they trade mock insults and one-liners with each other. It is obvious that the two characters, the two actors (Walter Kinsella and John Miles), enjoyed working together on this film. They managed to trek all over Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx on a short production schedule and on a tight budget. They even tour tattoo parlors on the Bowery back when it was a neighborhood populated by people who had problems with alcohol and public drunkenness.

And they have fun doing it, which means fun for viewers, too.

February 9, 1950 (premiere in New York City), March 11, 1950, release dates    Directed by Edward Montagne    Screenplay by Philip H. Reisman Jr.    Music by Alan Shulman    Edited by David Cooper    Cinematography by William O. Steiner

John Miles as Detective Frank Tobin    Patricia Barry as Dr. Mary Mahan    Walter Kinsella as Lieutenant Corrigan    Frank Tweddell as Captain Lundquist (aka Lundy)    Rod McLennan as Captain Gavin    Henry Lasko as Joe Canko    Arhtur L. Jarrett as Johnny Marseille    Jim Boles as Fisher    William Gibberson as Aberfoyle    Jack Lord as Detective Deke Del Vecchio

Distributed by RKO Radio Pictures Inc.    Produced by RKO Pathé Inc.

Sunday, September 7, 2025

Ten Years of Film Noir at Make Mine Film Noir, and It All Started in The Dark Corner (1946)

Make Mine Film Noir celebrates its tenth anniversary!

Ten years ago today, I launched Make Mine Film Noir with an article about The Dark Corner (1946). The film is one of my all-time favorites, and to celebrate, I saw it again. (Okay. I admit it: I have seen the film several times in-between.)

I am happy to report that Brad Galt and Kathleen Stuart, the two main characters, are just as entertaining and engaging as ever. In spite of reports that Lucille Ball hated the film and hated working on it, the chemistry between her character and Stevens’s is still there on-screen. Their repartee certainly helps: It looks like both actors are having fun delivering their lines. And they aren’t the only ones. Almost all the characters have a chance to shine with puns and comedic lines, especially Hardy Cathcart, played by Clifton Webb.

The snappy dialogue isn’t the only clever use of language. I think other writers would also appreciate Brad Galt’s line to Lieutenant Frank Reeves when the latter comes calling to check on Galt at his new office: “I’m playing this [his private investigation firm] by the book, and I won’ even trip over a comma.”

And then there is the running baseball metaphor that Kathleen Stuart uses at the start of her courtship with Brad, something she brings up more than once. And because the on-screen chemistry is working, it’s not long before Brad is embellishing the metaphor. How can Kathleen—and viewers, too—not be charmed by this handsome private investigator? And all because her father was a major league umpire!

The film also uses slang terms that are unusual even for film noir. Film noir uses a lot of slang from the 1940s and 1950s, and I almost always use captioning to figure out what the characters are saying. I often have to consult online dictionaries to learn the meanings of words that are unfamiliar to me, to probably all film viewers today. Here are just two examples from The Dark Corner:

pepper pot = handgun

shagging = following someone, tailing a suspect (not the meaning of the term in British English)

Both are obvious from the context in the film, which is a lucky break because I tried to find them online and couldn’t.

This description might make people think that The Dark Corner is not a film noir at all, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Be warned: There is plenty of violence and betrayal to go around.

I have written about The Dark Corner twice before on this blog. Click on each list item below to read more about the film:

The Dark Corner (1946)

Four Favorite Noirs: Born to Kill (1947), The Dark Corner (1946), Marlowe (1969), and Too Late for Tears (1949)

Next year, on April 9, 2026, The Dark Corner celebrates its eightieth anniversary. I’ll be seeing it again, I’m sure.

What amazes me after ten years is that I have just scratched the surface, that I have more noir to see, enjoy, and write about. I hope to keep writing for another ten years.

April 9, 1946, release date    Directed by Henry Hathaway    Screenplay by Bernard C. Schoenfeld and Jay Dratler •  Based on a story by Leo Rosten    Music by Cyril J. Mockridge    Edited by J. Watson Webb, Jr.    Cinematography by Joseph MacDonald

Lucile Ball as Kathleen Stuart    Mark Stevens as Bradford Galt    Clifton Webb as Hardy Cathcart    William Bendix as Stauffer, alias Fred Foss, White Suit    Kurt Kreuger as Anthony Jardine    Cathy Downs as Mari Cathcart    Reed Hadley as Lieutenant Frank Reeves    Constance Collier as Mrs. Kingsley    Eddie Heywood as himself, playing with his orchestra    Molly Lamont as Lucy Wilding    Ellen Corby as the maid

Distributed by Twentieth Century Fox    Produced by Twentieth Century Fox

Thursday, August 28, 2025

Dangerous Crossing (1953): An Ocean Cruise with a Noir Twist

Ruth Stanton Bowman is on a honeymoon cruise with her new husband John Bowman in Dangerous Crossing. The last thing she expects is to lose him on the ship. They met four weeks and two days earlier, so they really don’t know each other very well. That’s the first clue that something may not be quite right. After they board, John leads Ruth to their cabin, Cabin B-16, where she admits that she was a mess when he first met her—the second clue that trouble might be looming. John leaves Ruth in their cabin to stash some money with the purser’s office—and then disappears. Ruth spends the remainder of the film looking for her missing husband and trying to solve the mystery about how he—how anyone—could disappear on a ship at sea.

Ruth looks for John when he first disappears but doesn’t see him anywhere. When she returns to Cabin B-16, their cabin, the door is locked. She asks the steward to unlock it, but the cabin is now empty, and he tells her that the cabin has not been booked for this crossing. She doesn’t have the key; she doesn’t have the tickets. The steward gets the purser, and while Ruth is alone in the empty cabin, she thinks to herself: “I knew it couldn’t last. . . John, what have they done? Why did I let you get mixed up in all my troubles?”

(This blog post about Dangerous Crossing contains spoilers.)

Ruth faces another problem: Is she a flighty, hysterical woman, as everyone is beginning to suspect? When the steward and the purser return to Ruth in Cabin B-16, the purser finds that Ruth is checked into Cabin B-18 under her maiden name. When they arrive in the new cabin, she finds her own luggage, but not her husband’s. The purser plans to call the ship’s doctor, but Ruth protests. When she leaves Cabin B-18 to look for John again, she is frightened inexplicably by a man walking with a cane and collapses. When Ruth comes to, the purser; the ship’s nurse, Nurse Bridges; and the ship’s doctor, Dr. Paul Manning, are in her cabin.

All the people that she can remember seeing before her husband disappeared claim never to have seen him. Second Officer Jim Logan saw her at the gangplank, but he doesn’t remember seeing Ruth with anyone else. Anna Quinn, the stewardess, did see both Ruth and John in Cabin B-16 when they first arrived, but she claims that she was never in Cabin B-16. Ruth now wants to see the ship’s captain, and the ship’s doctor accompanies her.

Captain Peters orders a search of the ship. He discovers that Ruth has no passport and no tickets, and she is not wearing a wedding ring. The doubts about her sanity begin in earnest. Captain Peters offers to let Ruth leave the ship on a pilot boat and return to New York City. She refuses to leave the ship until she finds her husband. After she leaves the captain’s quarters, Dr. Manning tells Captain Peters that he wants to check her story and verify what she says. Captain Peters wants the doctor to keep an eye on Ruth because he can’t have her running around the ship and disturbing the other passengers.

In the meantime, John calls Ruth in her new cabin, Cabin B-18. (How does he know the cabin number?) He tells her, “We’re in terrible danger, Ruth. I’ll tell you more when I can. All I can say now is, don’t trust anyone. Not anyone.” He promises to call the next night, at 10 p.m. When he doesn’t, Ruth fears for his safety.

Dr. Manning tells her that the search of the ship ordered by Captain Peters is complete. John Bowman is not onboard the ship. But Ruth doesn’t believe this and wants to continue searching for her husband.

Ruth trusts her husband John completely. The number of people that she doesn’t trust is long. It includes crew members and other passengers: Anna Quinn, the stewardess; Key Prentiss, a fellow passenger who introduced herself to Ruth before the ship even set sail; Captain Peters; Dr. Manning; Second Officer Jim Logan, who saw her but not her husband board the ship; the male passenger with a cane; and Nurse Bridges. Dangerous Crossing does a good job of building the suspense. When the film reveals the true villain, I was surprised because, unlike Ruth, I didn’t trust anyone at all and suspected everyone, including her husband.

The film also highlights the predicament of women in the 1950s. In addition to Ruth’s inability to keep her emotions in check when she is most in need of keeping her wits about her, others are quick to judge her negatively. Except for Dr. Manning, no one is willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, even though she just lost her newlywed husband. Captain Peters is especially guilty of this, and Dr. Paul Manning is a bit doubtful, too, although he professes to be well-meaning. Ruth does not have the cruise tickets or her passport because she left them with her husband John. She is penalized for leaving her important documents with her husband during a period like the 1950s when that kind of submissive behavior was expected of women. In other words, she is damned if she does and damned if she doesn’t.

Dr. Manning and Ruth slowly become attracted to one another: They start to spend a lot of time together while Ruth looks for John and the doctor investigates Ruth. Ruth becomes hysterical when Dr. Manning shows her a radiogram stating that people she knows at home in Philadelphia don’t know of any John Bowman and don’t believe that Ruth is married. Ruth gets so hysterical that Dr. Manning slaps her across the face. He may have come across as well-meaning in 1953, but I thought he was a little bit creepy and a little bit sexist by 2025 standards. And slapping Ruth across the face isn’t the only example.

Dr. Manning helps Ruth search for her husband John in places where admittance to passengers is prohibited. Ruth decides that she wants to know more about Dr. Manning while he takes her on this tour of the ship. She learns that he has never been married and that he enjoys his job as a medical doctor aboard a cruise ship: “I’ve saved the lives of people I’ve never seen before and will never see again. I don’t know which it is I like more, the feeling of responsibility or the feeling of power. I don’t know many men who could play God so many times in the course of a year.” Dr. Manning professes to Ruth and to Captain Peters that he wants to help Ruth, but this conversation didn’t strike him from the suspect list for me.

Dr. Manning is tending to Ruth in her cabin when Captain Peters arrives to tell them that the stewardess, Anna Quinn, gave a full confession: She and John Bowman, who married Ruth using an alias, were working together to get rid of Ruth and steal her inheritance. The captain tells Ruth: “After we talked to her [Quinn], we found these . . . . Your passport and your marriage certificate.” Dr. Manning is quick to intercede: “I’ll take those, Captain, until she needs them.”

After Captain Peters leaves, Dr. Manning continues his position of authority over Ruth, and Ruth says nothing to Dr. Manning about him taking her documents, and she even lets him leave her cabin with them. Ruth Bowman doesn’t learn her lesson, which makes Dangerous Crossing even more noir than, I believe, the original filmmakers intended. When Captain Peters hands her passport and marriage license to her, she should never have let Dr. Manning grab them. Leaving them in the possession of her husband John Bowman is what got her into trouble in the first place. She sure as heck shouldn’t have allowed Dr. Manning to leave her cabin with those documents. But this is the world of film noir. And few questioned women’s place in the world in 1953.

Dangerous Crossing may seem a bit dated today, but the film is still fun to watch, especially if you like a puzzle with a lot of pieces. I rooted for Ruth all the way, and I think viewers are meant to. The story is told from her point of view, so viewers believe her perceptions and what she is going through. Jeanne Crain gives a wonderful performance as the put-upon Ruth Bowman, who doesn’t have enough opportunities to enjoy her honeymoon cruise.

And if you are a fan of Carl Betz, Dangerous Crossing is worth a look because of his performance. He’s not on-screen much after his character disappears mysteriously, but I thought he made the most of his screen time. I am used to seeing Betz in The Donna Reed Show reruns, and it was a real treat to see him in Dangerous Crossing. And not just for his acting abilities, by the way. In one scene, he is shirtless; in another, he is dressed in a uniform. He carries off both scenes—and all his others—quite nicely!

This article about Dangerous Crossing (1953) is my entry for the Hit the Road Blogathon hosted by Quiggy at The Midnite Drive-In. Click here for the complete list of blogathon participants and links to their blogs. The list is updated each day of the blogathon, from August 29 to September 1, 2025.

August 1953 release date    Directed by Joseph M. Newman    Screenplay by Leo Townsend    Based on the radio play Cabin B-13 by John Dickson Carr    Music by Lionel Newman    Edited by William H. Reynolds    Cinematography by Joseph LaShelle

Jeanne Crain as Ruth Stanton Bowman    Michael Rennie as Dr. Paul Manning    Carl Betz as John Bowman    Mary Anderson as Anna Quinn    Marjorie Hoshelle as Kay Prentiss    Willis Bouchey as Captain Peters    Yvonne Peattie as Nurse Bridges    Max Showalter (aka Casey Adams) as Second Officer Jim Logan

Distributed by Twentieth Century Fox    Produced by Twentieth Century Fox