TCM’s Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at 12:15 a.m. ET (and 10 a.m. ET) is Pat Jackson’s Complicated Shadow on the Wall (1950), Featuring Ann Sothern, Zachary Scott, Nancy Davis, Gigi Perreau, John McIntire, Kristine Miller and Tom Helmore, Based on Lawrence P. Bachmann, Hannah Lees, and William Ludwig’s Story

By David in TN
Friday, June 21, 2019 at 12:24:00 A.M. EDT

TCM’s Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at 12:15 a.m. ET (and 10 a.m. ET Sunday Morning) is Shadow on the Wall (1950). It features Ann Sothern, Zachary Scott, Nancy Davis, Gigi Perreau, John McIntire, Kristine Miller, Tom Helmore (Vertigo), directed by Pat Jackson.

Film Noir Guide: “Architect Scott returns from a business trip to discover that his new wife (Miller) is having an affair with her sister’s fiancé (Helmore). While unpacking a gun, Scott gets into an argument with Miller and she, fearing he plans to shoot her, knocks him out cold with a mirror. Miller’s sister (Sothern) shows up and, in a jealous rage over Helmore, accidentally shoots her with Scott’s gun. Scott, who believes that the gun must have gone off when Miller hit him with the mirror, is arrested for murder. After he’s convicted and sentenced to death, the remorseful Sothern pens a confession but, before delivering it to police, she has a noirish vision of her own electrocution and tears it up. Then she discovers that Scott’s six-year old daughter (Perreau), who’s being treated by a psychiatrist (Davis) for shock, witnessed her stepmother’s murder, and decides she must get rid of the little girl before her memory of the killing returns. Sothern is terrific as a nice girl who metamorphoses into a vicious femme fatale before our unbelieving eyes.”

Sound complicated?

First Lady (three decades later) Nancy Davis does well as an “ahead of her time” psychiatrist.

N.S.: Tom Helmore played the heavy in Vertigo (1958).

John McIntire had a rich, rewarding career as a character actor in pictures and on the small screen. In Phil Karlson’s The Phenix City Story (1953), he played the corruption-busting DA who gets assassinated by the “Dixie Mafia.” In Anthony Mann’s classic Western, The Far Country (1955), based on real, wild, wild West events in the Yukon’s Skagway, he played the chief heavy, murderous, Roy Bean-style judge who routinely hanged innocent men, in order to steal their property (cattle and gold). In one scene he tells the hero, played by Jimmy Stewart, with great relish, “I like you. I’m gonna hang you, but I like you.” Segueing into TV in the late 1950s, like so many Hollywood actors, he became a star, first on the revolutionary cop show, Naked City, and then as the replacement for Ward Bond, who had dropped dead of a massive coronary in 1960, on the hit Western show, Wagon Train (1957-1965). The show ran another five years with McIntire as its star (with his real-life wife playing his on-air wife).

Ann Sothern was one of the eponymous wives in Joe Mankiewicz’ Oscar-winning, A Letter to Three Wives the previous year, but is best remembered for the mid-1960s’ sitcom My Mother the Car, considered by some critics to be the worst TV show of all time. Mother starred the late Jerry Van Dyke, may he rest in peace, with Sothern’s voice playing Van Dyke’s dead mother, who has been reincarnated as a 1928 Porter automobile, and who speaks to her son through the car’s radio. Heck, it was a job, and a girl’s gotta work.

At the age of seven, I viewed My Mother the Car religiously.


The Theme Song to My Mother the Car