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In Cause for Alarm, Loretta Young is an elegantly tailored happy homemaker caring for her invalid husband (Barry Sullivan), a former pilot suffering from a mysterious heart disease that has driven him to almost complete madness. Convinced his wife and his doctor are in collusion to kill him, he's carefully recorded the "evidence" of their crime in a letter to the district attorney and prepares to turn the tables on them, but even his own sudden death can't stop the chain of events that plunges his wife into a waking nightmare. An unusual entry into the film noir school of paranoia, Tay Garnett's melodramatic thriller trades the dark alleys and long shadows of urban menace for the sunny, tree-lined streets of middle-class domesticity. Young, so often cool, calm, and carefully coifed in her studio roles, beautifully evokes the American Dream as the dutiful wife who collapses into a state of hysterical desperation. Spinning a web of lies to retrieve the damning letter, her world falls apart around her as she unwittingly sinks herself deeper into a morass of suspicion and circumstantial evidence. Though this is less slick and stylish than his claim to film noir fame The Postman Always Rings Twice, Garnett spins a simple premise into a tense, terrifying ordeal, and Young's deadened narration adds an eerie mood of doom to the suburban setting. --Sean Axmaker