Whirlpool (1949) started as a 1945 novel by Guy Endore entitled Methinks the Lady... Endore, who was also an Oscar-nominated screenwriter for The Story of G.I. Joe (1945), adapted his novel into a screenplay for Twentieth Century-Fox in 1946, but then the project lay dormant for two years. When studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck resurrected it in 1948, he assigned Andrew Solt (who would soon write the noir masterpiece In a Lonely Place [1950]) to rewrite it, and announced Gene Tierney and Richard Conte for the lead roles. Zanuck would hire one more distinguished screenwriter, the multi-Oscar-nominated (and two-time winner) Ben Hecht, to do one further rewrite.

The movie is a psychological film noir, directed by Otto Preminger, in which Conte plays a psychiatrist who doesn't realize his wife, Tierney, is a kleptomaniac. She enlists a hypnotist named David Korvo (Jose Ferrer) to help cure her, but Korvo has sinister motives of his own -- and is not above using hypnosis for nefarious purposes! Ultimately, a police detective (Charles Bickford) steps in to try and unravel the events surrounding a murder, with all three men trying to access Tierney's mind for the answers.

According to film historian Chris Fujiwara (The World and Its Double: The Life and Work of Otto Preminger), Darryl Zanuck's memos from the time indicate that he specifically wanted Whirlpool to recapture the magic of Laura (1944), which had also starred Tierney, been directed by Preminger, and told a noir-ish mystery story. In addition, both films have scores by David Raksin, and Whirlpool even works in a portrait of one of its female characters in a nod to the famous Laura portrait. Zanuck further wrote that he wanted Korvo, the Jose Ferrer character, to be "just as interesting as Clifton Webb was in Laura."

Korvo certainly is interesting -- if you consider it interesting for a character to hypnotize himself to feel no pain soon after a gallbladder removal surgery, which he only had in the first place to create an alibi! Whirlpool is steeped in the world of medicine and hypnosis, and studio production notes indicate that Preminger was fastidious about portraying this content accurately. He "had every premise of the screenplay checked and re-checked by physicians, psychiatrists, psychologists and analysts." He even engaged as an on-set technical adviser one Fred Schneider, a so-called hypnotist to the stars.

Whirlpool was shot in seven weeks during the summer of 1949 at a cost of about $1.3 million. It opened that November to mixed reviews; many of the plot contrivances were seen as unbelievable, but the hypnosis subject matter proved intriguing -- as it still does. Some advertisements warned, "If you are easily hypnotized, don't see it alone!" Jose Ferrer, in only his second film, drew the best notices. Richard Conte seemed miscast as a psychiatrist, though it is entertaining to see him bring his tough-guy disposition to the part. And Gene Tierney was welcomed back to the screen after almost a year's absence following the birth in 1948 of her second daughter, Christina.

By Jeremy Arnold