The Verdict (1946)

A masterpiece if your thing is Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre framed in gaslight. I'd watch them read table menus for the ninety minutes involved, which at times seems extent of action in The Verdict, a leisure stride fans would want no other way. Greenstreet/Lorre were about byplay and contrast of style/appearance, a triumph of character men bending a star system to their unique measure. Greenstreet in an Inverness cape looks like three guys walking astride, his voice an instrument that plays pure pleasure. Lorre too, of course, who was always best when bent, even if slightly. Their teamings were like Burbank doing Karloff/Lugosi on bigger budget terms, the pair fortunate they weren't typed to horror subjects and so able to reach mainstream patronage. "Mystery" could be creepy, but not horrific, with always a rational explanation for what happens. That was firm foundation of thrillers WB did with Greenstreet/Lorre.

You could turn off sound and derive scares off fog-bound setting, The Verdict not unlike Fox's The Lodger for tension the equal of chillers done elsewhere. New-to-directing-features Don Siegel was given The Verdict for Warner initiation. He said in a fine memoir that the script was weak and the picture dull, both of which you could reasonably argue, but Siegel was assessing The Verdict from '46 perspective, not in rose-hue terms on which we now approach it. Production was against backdrop of a violent studio strike that required Siegel to literally fight his…