The Notorious Landlady

A few weeks ago, I did a post on The Velvet Touch. I was thinking about that movie a I watched another movie that for some reason I though was coming up on the TCM schedule soon, The Notorious Landlady.

The movie starts off with a bit of a prologue in a fashionable part of London where the residents include elderly Mrs. Dunhill (Estelle Winwood). On her travels in and out of the neighborhood, she has to deal with one of those bratty kids who keeps popping up to be bratty whenever that's what's needed for the plot. As the movie opens he likes to terrorize people by pointing his cap gun at them. Everybody hears a shot, except that this time it's not from the cap gun but from one of the other houses on the square.

Fast forward several months. Carly Hardwicke (Kim Novak) lives in one of the houses on the square, and has offered a flat to let, preferably to a couple. One family does show up, but they realize that this is Carly Hardwicke, and walk away, which means that she has a past. It doesn't take much to guess what that past is, since we saw the prologue. So we know what the "notorious" in the title is referring to.

Not knowing is Bill Gridley (Jack Lemmon). Bill is an American, working in the Foreign Service and having just been transferred to London from Saudi Arabia. So of course he wouldn't know what happened six months previously. He cottons on fairly quickly that Carly, dressed as the maid of the house, is in fact not a maid but the lady of the house, and that she's alone. Carly had wanted a couple to rent, but she's hard up for money, so she relents and rents the entire second story to Bill.

The next day at work, Bill mentions where he found a place to rent, and the name sounds very familiar to Bill's boss, Franklyn Ambruster (Fred Astaire). Ambruster does a bit of research, and realizes that Hardwicke is presumed to be the one who fired that shot that everybody heard in the prologue. The belief is that it killed her husband, who has been missing ever since that shot, and that Carly is therefore the obvious suspect in a murder case. The only thing is, nobody's been able to find Mr. Hardwicke's body, which is kind of important if you're going to try someone for murder.

Having an officer in the foreign service be involved in a case like this wouldn't do for the Americans, but they don't have much choice since Bill is renting that flat. So Ambruster brings in Scotland Yard and they impress on Bill the idea that he should help them in getting information by more or less spying on his landlady and getting whatever information he can that will either help prove her guilt or exonerate her.

It's not too hard to guess where things are going to go for much of the rest of the movie, since this is a more comedic mystery. Bill is going to fall in love with Carly, but there's going to be one misunderstanding after another that makes Bill think perhaps Carly really is a murderess. However, since it's a lighter movie, the viewer can presume that she is in fact not the killer. And indeed, Mr. Hardwicke does eventually show up.

The Notorious Landlady is another of those movies that doesn't quite work, in large part because it has to hew to so many of the tropes of the genre that we know where it's going to be going. If it were a noir, we'd know Mrs. Hardwicke is bad news; here, we know that some coincidence is going to come to exonerate her. The script is also a bit unoriginal, making unnecessary homages to some classic films. The Notorious Landlady was filmed in 1961 and has one scene of Jack Lemmon tell Kim Novak he "adores" her that felt like it came straight out of the final scene of The Apartment. And there's a scene of a shower drain that looked like it could have been taken from the editing room of Psycho. The Notorious Landlady also runs 123 minutes, which is a good half hour too long for material like this.

So I'd say it's with reason that The Notorious Landlady is not the best-remembered movie for any of its stars.