The Hidden Room

Another of those movies that sounded interesting and that I had on my old DVR but never got around to watching was a British movie called Obsession, originally released in the US under the title The Hidden Room. However, TCM ran it again a few months back, and when I watched my recording, the print bears the British title Obsession. At any rate, recently I finally got around to watching it in order to be able to do a review on it.

Robert Newton plays Dr. Clive Riordan, a psychiatrist living in London with his wife Storm (Sally Gray), although as the movie starts, he's away for reasons not quite mentioned. He returns home early, where we see he's one of those fairly well-off doctor types, since he's got a butler living there, able to open the door as Clive comes home fairly late in the evening, Storm being out and not there to let Clive in or welcome him home.

It turns out that Storm is seeing another man, American Bill Kronin (Phil Brown). Clive is none too pleased, since what husband wants his wife to step out on him? So Clive decides to turn off the lights and surprise Storm and Bill once they come in the house. Clive is fairly nasty to his wife and her boyfriend, although to be fair he has a good right to be nasty. Unfortunately, he decides to be a bit too nasty, pulling a gun on the couple, but not shooting them.

Oh, no, Clive comes up with a completely different idea. He decides that he's going to commit the perfect murder, like a man cuckolded. And fortunately for him, he's got a good candidate to murder. Not Storm, since her getting murdered would attract too much attention and Clive would be the natural suspect. Bill, on the other hand, is a near perfect murder victim. He's an American in Britain in an era when transatlantic communication is nothing like what we have today with the Internet and all that. But there's still the question of how to murder Bill, and what to do with the body.

Clive comes up with what seems like a ridiculous plan. Not far from where he garages his car in the vicinity of his private practice, he's found a cellar room that's not noticed largely because it's in an area that still looks like it's got some damage from the recently concluded war. Clive kidnaps Bill, more or less, and holds him hostage in the room, with the plan to kill Bill eventually and then dissolve the body in acid. (Where's Clive going to get that much acid?)

News of Bill's having gone missing does make the papers, but since there's almost nobody around who knows him well, there's nothing in the way of clues, other than Storm's knowledge that Clive had talked about murdering Bill. But then Storm would have to reveal how much she's been unfaithful to Clive, and in the UK of this era, that's something she doesn't want to let on because reasons partly having to do with lying to Clive about getting a letter from Bill after Clive already kidnapped him.

Now, of course, since the movie got released in the US, we know that it has to conform to the Production Code. So how do things go wrong for Clive? First off, there's Detective Superintendent Finsbury (Naunton Wayne) of Scotland Yard. Finsbury is one of those detectives that dotted noir and noir-adjacent movies who serves to drive the real killer mad by intimating that he knows more about the case than he really does, hoping to get the murderer to screw up. And then there's Storm's dog Monty. One day Storm is going for a walk with the dog, and Monty runs off... precisely to the door of the underground chamber where Clive has Bill holed up. Clive knows that Monty could go back there again and bollix his plans....

The plot of Obsession is a bit far-fetched, but the movie does mostly work, effectively building suspense thanks to a bunch of understated performances from the cast. It's not a prestige movie, which I think is part of why it's not so well-remembered, certainly not on this side of the Atlantic. But it's one that's definitely worth a watch.