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A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

This is one of the most intelligent thrillers ever made, with actors like Charles Laughton, Ray Milland, James Macready and Elsa Lanchester adding to the excellence. The main thing about the film is how the intrigue develops. It is a quiet war between an editor and his number one journalist, and while the almighty editor suspects nothing of Ray Milland's involvement, Ray Milland has the more reason to tread the more carefully - and does so with a vengeance all the way through - he actually never has to implicate his boss himself. Maureen O'Sullivan plays the poor wife who has the arduous task of adding yet another intrigue to the horribly mixed up mess of complications by her personal objections to her husband's blatant liberties, but there are several ingenious comedy instances as well, especially the goings-on at the bar where Ray Milland is too well known. There are so many captivating details about this brilliant thriller, that it will never do to see it only once.

Taut thriller about a crime magazine editor (Ray Milland) trying to stay one step ahead of being framed for murder by his tyrannical boss (Charles Laughton). Ray Milland is great but it's scenery-chewing Charles Laughton that is the most memorable part of this movie. George Macready plays Laughton's crony and partner-in-crime. Rita Johnson is fantastic as Laughton's mistress. Elsa Lanchester has a small but amusing part that she makes the most of. Harry Morgan appears in an early role as a "problem solver" for Laughton. This was Maureen O'Sullivan's first movie in five years and her first non-Tarzan movie in seven. Director John Farrow was also her husband at the time so I'm sure that had something to do with her returning to the screen.A tightly paced film with a great script. Fine direction from Farrow. It was remade in 1987 as No Way Out, which isn't a bad movie itself. Thankfully it isn't a direct copy but a reworking of the original story. Both the remake and this original have wonderful (and completely different) endings. This is definitely one you'll want to check out if you're a fan of film noir or thrillers from the '40s.

I give this film a "7", though it was a temptation to give it an "8", but a "7" is my highest rating, unless we are talking one of the great films of all time. And this film is not that, but it is darned good.It is darned good because it is darned different. I can't think of another film that is at all like it (except perhaps the recent remake). It's a rather unique plot with a unique character (Charles Laughton) and a unique setting.The story begins via flashback. As it unfolds, Ray Milland's character (editor-in-chief of a crime magazine) inadvertently gets tied into a murder of a woman he met...who just happened to be the girlfriend of the magazine's's owner (Charles Laughton) -- a real sleaze bag...and the real killer! All the cards are stacked against Milland, however, and his desperate task is to clear himself and implicate the real murdered (whom he thinks is Laughton's assistant). What happens in between all this is clever and different, with a host of odd characters.Milland, whom I've come to respect more lately as I've seen some films of his of which I was not previously aware, is excellent here. So is Charles Laughton, although this is another role of Laughton's where we love despising him. And incidentally, Laughton's mustache here may be one of the worst in any film in cinema history! The other main character is Maureen O'Sullivan as Milland's wife, though this is quite a step down from her as she plains a supporting, rather than a starring role. You'll recognize quite a few other characters, though none is memorable, despite each being key to the plot.The ending is a total surprise, although it happens just a tad too quickly to savor.That's all not to say that there aren't some problems here. We all have had jobs we don't like. Why exactly are this husband and wife so thrilled to be without and income? At 58 minutes into the film you can clearly see the shadow of the boom mic. Why are Elsa Lanchester's children from 3 different marriages all approximately the same age?Nevertheless, this may very well be one for your DVD shelf!

Call me a disbeliever, but I find the plot of this movie utterly unrealistic. A pretty good one though; an action packaged, solidly built, suspense flick moving along at a sustained pace, as regular as the drumbeat in Ravel's Bolero. And its acting is the best, especially from Milland and Macready, while Laughton overplays his character a little bit. As for Lanchester, she's clearly enjoying each one of her moments in front of the camera, but it's Sullivan the one underused here, almost an afterthought—just see how almost nothing would have changed to the plot had they taken out her Georgette. Good cinematography also, especially with the overlapping shots, fade-outs and the group shots during the war councils in the blackboard room. An entertaining thriller, which I don't know why people insist in calling noir. In my book, a film noir is the application of the physical laws of entropy--everything in Nature tends to chaos, fragmentation and loss—to movies, so it's impossible for a noir to have a happy, or at least satisfying, ending. It always has to be bad, at least sad. If main characters end up alive and well, at least they got to be are sad because of losses or failures, even when there is no moral degradation--as it happened in Scarlet Street. Instead, the mood here is upbeat, even optimistic, so much so TBC could have easily been turned into a comedy--for ex., had the corpse disappeared from the lieu of the crime and had Pauline appeared alive & well at the end, because she didn't die after all, but went into hiding, after regaining consciousness, for fear of Janoth. In any case this film has the looks and the feel of a Hitchcock and I would have certainly thought so had not known beforehand that was Mia Farrow's dad the man behind the camera.When I say unrealistic, I'm referring to two basic plot elements which make it hard to digest. The first concerns not so much the jam Janoth finds himself in after the killing of his mistress, but the way he acts in such a circumstance. See, I have lived enough to realize that the higher your social standing is, the bigger the things you may get away with--including murder. Janoth should have known better and realized that what he does then is stupid, something showing his lack of awareness about his own place in society, and that he didn't need to do any police job. Someone as powerful as him would have never acted the way he does.In real life, after thinking about it for a minute, Janoth would have simply called police and reported that he has just found Pauline dead when coming to visit her. Then, not much later phones would have started ringing in offices of politicians, chiefs of police, members of the judiciary, and every effort would have been displayed to get him out of the jam and away from the lieu of the crime and from the case itself. (remember The Sting, when the "FBI brass" orders the local policeman to get the high profile hoodlum out of the place where two men have been just killed; and he was just a bandit!).That's what would have happened in TBC: the intervening policemen would have been ordered to get Janoth immediately out of that apt. and to keep complete silence about his presence there. And even if he had arrived to confess the killing, that wouldn't have made any difference; he would have been shielded anyway, on account of his importance for society. Before TV, or the Internet, press barons were of great importance for the political and economical establishments. And even after that; just remember the Life magazine photos of L.H. Oswald holding a rifle, after the Kennedy assassination, which went a long way into convincing public opinion he was really a gun nut. That's the kind of favor men like Janoth used to provide regularly to people in high places, so was anybody going to rock his boat just because of such a silly thing, for a dead woman? That's why if a man like him had ever found himself in such a bind he wouldn't have even lost his cool. All he had to do then was to make a few phone calls, inform the right people, and wait there to be taken out of the jam, so he may keep performing such valuable services. (In fact Stroud himself recognizes this when he says to his wife: Janoth could find dozens of alibis, I only have myself.) If anybody doesn't agree with such analysis I invite him, her, to see the Italian movie Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto (1970) where Gian Maria Volonté--of spaghetti western fame--plays a Chief of Homicides who murders his mistress and who starts intentionally leaving clues around, linking him to the crime, as if wanting to test how far he could go; if he can get away with murder, so to speak, because of his high post. Despite all his efforts at auto-incrimination his peers refuse to take him in. The film ends in a surreal scene, where his comrades gang up on him, forcing him to confess his...innocence. That was brilliant, much more realistic than what's shown here. Imagine Janoth leaving many clues linking him to the murder and watching with amusement how the police deploy every effort to lead the investigation in some other direction. That would have been a fun movie, but another one also.Another unrealistic element concerns Janoth's nasty "hobby" of firing people at a whim, but his employees still laboring happily under his orders. Believe me, I knew one of such places and that's no picnic; rather a living hell. But an entertaining flick anyway, if you overlook all what I said. 7/10.