Dark Waters

This noir directed by André de Toth opens with Leslie Calvin, the sole survivor of a submarine sinking. She goes to relatives in Louisiana to recover, but the house that receives her is not what she expected. The people around her keep questioning what she has seen and what she remembers, and she begins to doubt her own mind. The film builds its fear less from a threat than from nobody believing what a woman says, a pattern of the 1940s that reads differently now. Merle Oberon plays it inside a steadily narrowing space, with Franchot Tone and Thomas Mitchell opposite her. The swamp and the damp supply the real atmosphere. The ending is left unspoiled.