Note: This is the final review of a Gail Patrick movie. She retired from acting in 1948, spent a few years focusing on family life with her third husband, Thomas Cornwell Jackson, and their adopted children. Once they were settled, boredom set in - bridge with the LA ladies wasn’t cutting it. Thanks to Jackson’s ties to Erle Stanley Gardner, she co-founded Paisano Productions and launched the Perry Mason TV series. “I don’t have the soul of an actress,” she told TV Guide in 1962. “I have a dollar sign for a soul.” I won’t weigh in on soul-searching, but maybe Jackson, a lifelong Democrat, nudged the writers toward themes of women’s struggles, class friction, marginalized voices, and corruption. So I don’t think money was really at the top of her list of values.
The
Madonna’s Secret
1946 / 1:19
[internet
archive]
Consider a French painter (Francis Lederer) living in New York with his American mother (Leona Roberts). His apartment is oppressively quiet, and his mental state soaks in depression and anxiety. In Paris, he was acquitted of a model’s drowning, a fact that anchors subsequent judgments on the part of the cops and public opinion. When another model disappears and is found dead, a journalist recalls this sad narrative and feels alarm. The availability of a vivid past event drives his intuition: “He kills for inspiration.” This is psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s classic System 1 thinking - fast, associative, and wrong.
The journalist enlists the victim’s sister (Ann Rutherford) to pose for the painter, hoping to confirm his hypothesis. This maneuver illustrates confirmation bias: evidence is sought to fit a story, not to test it. Yet, as the woman spends time with the painter, conversation - mere words - shifts her perception. Emotional reasoning overrides probabilistic thinking: “I like him; therefore, he cannot be guilty.” Kahneman would call this the affect heuristic – gut feelings as a substitute for facts.
Social dynamics add noise. A wealthy socialite (Gail Patrick), dismissive and shallow, competes for the painter’s attention. Her disappearance triggers another leap: the police, primed by two prior drownings, infer guilt from a torn scrap of clothing. This is anchoring in action - early information exerts disproportionate influence on present thinking. Intercultural cognition complicates matters further. When the American woman declares, “I fear death,” the painter responds with cool Gallic logic: “Why fear the inevitable?” Different priors, different frames.
The film becomes a study in cognitive errors:
·
Mind reading: The journalist imagines
motives without evidence.
·
Overgeneralization: Two deaths become a
causal pattern.
·
Emotional reasoning: Affection blinds
judgment.
· Cultural framing: Fear and fatalism collide.
Memorable scenes reinforce the tension. A nightclub act features a knife-throwing assistant who sings while blades fly - an example of risk normalized. In another, the painter dishevels the woman’s hair, a gesture oscillating between intimacy and menace. Touch, often coercive, signals gendered power asymmetries. The police, predictably, act with narrow-minded certainty - brutal, impatient, and armed to the teeth. In Kahneman’s terms, they trust intuition over analysis, substituting “What happened?” with “Who fits the story?” They’re just human beings, after all, and subject to the same mental shortcuts as anybody else.
This noir narrative is less about crime than cognition. It dramatizes how humans, under uncertainty, default to heuristics - anchoring, availability, affect - while ignoring alternative plausible hypotheses. The result is a cascade of errors, each psychologically plausible, all avoidable.
As for the connections to the classic Perry Mason TV series, the wonderful Geraldine Wall plays the journalist’s secretary who’s no-nonsense but funny. She was in a half-dozen PM episodes but her best outing was in TCOT Baited Hook, as that very rare species on the show, the perp with whom we movie-goers sympathize. She would’ve been a great Bertha Cool.
Will Wright played Jerry the Riverman in a brief scene. He was in three episodes as his character, the cantankerous coot, with the best performance as a partner in TCOT Petulant Partner. He looks like he’s going to blow a gasket when his long-time partner R.G. Armstrong comments on his ridiculous-for-his-age shirt, “You goin’ to a Sweet 16 party in that get-up?”
Other
Gail Patrick Movies: Click on the title to go to the review
·
If
I Had a Million
·
The
Phantom Broadcast
·
The
Murders in the Zoo
·
Death
Takes a Holiday
·
The
Crime of Helen Stanley
·
Murder
at the Vanities
·
The
Preview Murder Mystery
·
My
Man Godrey
·
Murder
by Pictures
·
Artists
and Models
·
King
of Alcatraz
·
Wives
Under Suspicion
·
Disbarred
·
Quiet Please Murder
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