Manhandled

In Lewis R. Foster’s 1949 film, Merle Kramer works as a stenographer for a psychiatrist. She is casually seeing Karl Benson, an ex-policeman now working as a private detective, and mentions in passing one of her employer’s patients: a writer who keeps dreaming that he has murdered his wife. She adds that the wife owns valuable jewellery. When the woman is killed in exactly the manner of the dream, suspicion naturally falls on the husband. But as the police and the insurance investigator Joe Cooper work through it, a good many people in the case, Merle included, turn out not to be what they appear. Dorothy Lamour, Sterling Hayden and Dan Duryea lead.