Cause for Alarm!

A not uninteresting attempt at a suburban film noir, with Loretta Young as a housewife whose bed-ridden ex-serviceman husband (Sullivan), consumed with totally unfounded jealousy, concocts a fiendish revenge plot. Having planted evidence indicating that she and her supposed lover were conspiring to poison him, he then proposes to shoot her, but dies of a heart attack. Although rather too fluttery for comfort, Young gives a good account of the woman's panic-stricken dilemma as, left alone with a corpse in the house and her every move adding to the web of suspicious circumstances, she desperately battles red tape to retrieve an incriminating letter posted to the DA. Unfortunately, the script throws in some heavy-handed exposition (notably a 'meeting cute' scene designed to shed light on Sullivan's mental state), betrays its MGM origins by a tiresome insistence on family values (a moppet next door stands in for the child the heroine yearns for), and contrives a risibly arbitrary happy ending.