The File on Thelma Jordon

Assistant district attorney Cleve Marshall is drinking in his office one evening when Thelma Jordon walks in. She says there has been a prowler at her wealthy aunt's house. An affair starts quickly between them. Then the aunt is murdered and Thelma is the principal suspect. Cleve is prosecuting the case; to save her and protect his own position he begins to lie, and each lie compels the next. Robert Siodmak works the central motif of film noir: what destroys a man is not the decision but the effort to defend it. At the centre of the narrative is not who committed the crime but a prosecutor rotting his own profession from inside. Barbara Stanwyck plays Thelma. The part is deliberately written as ambiguous and how much she planned is not clear until the end. Wendell Corey plays Cleve and Paul Kelly his colleague in the prosecutor's office. Who it's for: Viewers who like 1940s noir, Stanwyck, and courtroom-centred tension. Who it's not for: The narrative builds slowly and the moral frame of the period forces the ending. The resolution given to the woman also settles into a familiar shape.