A Double Life is an interesting experiment in film noir on Cukor’s part, if one that is in the end unsatisfying. Cukor jumps in with a great arsenal of stylistic tricks – double-exposures, dissolves, lighting effects and the use of interior monologue – many of which were way ahead of their time. And out of all of this, he conjures an intriguingly torrid atmosphere. The film is quite accurate in its depiction of the backstage life of a big theatre production, although Cukor’s staging of excerpts from Othello does tend to drag the film’s pace down, with these being allowed to take over for several minutes at a time. Cukor beefs the film up with amusing characters on the periphery – the reporters chatting as they wait for the coroner’s verdict, the wig-makers discussing black versus white coffee, Edmond O’Brien holding auditions with one starlet who keeps insisting that she is right for the role. Notable is Shelley Winters in one of her earliest performances as a suggestively cheap bimbo – “Don’t talk funny no more ... in fact don’t talk at all.”

But A Double Life works less effectively when it comes to the thriller elements. The film never travels inside the psychology of Ronald Colman’s psychotic over-identification with the role of Othello – overwork and an excess of character acting is given as an explanation (in some ways the whole film could be seen as a Frankensteinian critique of the Stanislavski school of acting). However Ronald Colman is clearly behaving in an unbalanced way before he even accepts the part so these seem cod explanations at best. Furthermore the script seems to abruptly wrap itself up without ever going to the places it seems to intimate it is heading (as though an upbeat ending had been enforced on Cukor by the studio). There is the strong sense that things are being set up for a symbolic replaying of the Othello-Iago-Desdemona triangle between Ronald Colman, wife Signe Hasso and Edmond O’Brien’s boyfriend – the logical way for the ending to play out would have been as the play does with all three parties dead due to jealousies and malicious lies. But before we can ever get anywhere into this, the film seems to come to an abrupt and most unsatisfying close with Ronald Colman stabbing himself on stage and a happily transcendent ending that cannot help but ring false as he begs Signe Hasso’s forgiveness before expiring.