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creative and executive control. As a female writer-producer, Harrison en-joyed authority and autonomy few women writers attained.⁷ Harrison’s Phantom Lady is a fine example of women working in Hollywood, produc-ing strong images of working women in film noir, during the war years.

Joaff Harrison, Robert Siodmak, and Phantom Lady In Phantom Lady Ella Raines’s working noirheroine, Kansas, takes time off her job to moonlight for the police and track down criminals. Tapping into a home-front audience of working wartime women, Raines’s active female character was the product of working woman Hitchcock protege, writer-producer Joan Harrison, who coscripted Hitchcock’s roman noir gothic films Rebecca and Suspicion. Based on a hard-boiled novel by William Irish, a pseudonym for writer Cornell Woolrich, whose early writing had con-tributed to Dime Detective and Detective Fiction Weekly,' Universal’s Phantom Lady was adapted by Bernard Schoenfeld, and Harrison was involved in story and script development for the screenplay. Phantom Lady is notable as a female hard-boiled detective noir crime film, where the protagonist is neither a małe nor a female victim (as in gothic Hitchcock thrillers Rebecca and Suspicion) nor a lethal femme fatale. Instead, the film centers on a strong, independent career-woman-turned-professional-female-detective who reluctantly poses as a loose, erotic femme to solve a cąse clearing her małe employer of a crime he did not commit. Visually deceptive and nar-ratively unpredictable, Phantom Lady opens with what appears to be the main character of the story: a man picks a woman up at a bar, takes the ex-otic stranger to a show, and then returns home to find menacing gangster-like police who interrogate him about his beautiful murdered wife in the bedroom. His alibi datę vanishes—a phantom lady whose absence struc-tures the film—while the presumed guilty hero is hauled off to jail and out of most of the picture. Enter his female office assistant, Kansas. Convinced of his innocence, she decides to solve the crime and save her boss from the chair. Donning a sexy femme alter ego, she picks up lascivious drummer Elisha Cook Jr. (one of his best roles) in a now famous orgiastic jazz seąuence (unbelievably approved by the PCA), entering a corrupt urban underworld of lies, payoffs, betrayal, and murder—where her boss’s best friend and professional colleague turns out to be the psychopathic killer (who had an affair with his wife before strangling her and framing him for the crime). In the classic “wrong-man” scenario Harrison cast both hero and villain against type—reversing customary roles to create ambiguity in the małe characters. Universal publicized framed good guy Alan Curtis as a“once villain” who “makes [a] romantic bid.” Harrisons casting provided

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a “good looking” and “romantic” antagonist with masculine sex appeal to target women, referring to “the fair sex” to describe the female home-front audience. An anti-intellectual bent infused the film’s “mysterious killer,” played by Franchot Tonę, described as a “psychopathic intellectual.” Em-phasizing the film’s realism, promotional materiał describes howTone“con-sulted a noted Beverly Hills psychiatrist to obtain authentic information on the physical and nervous reactions of a psychopathic depressive.” Initially, even the police seem to morę closely resemble thugs than law-enforcement officials.⁸

Produced in late 1943, Universal’s Phantom Lady combined małe and female European emigrćs—newly autonomous British producer Harrison and director Robert Siodmak. Harrison had just negotiated a producing project for herself at Universal when she happened to meet Siodmak in a restaurant freąuented by ćmigres near the studio in 1943. The two hit it off, initiating discussions that resulted in their collaborating on Phantom Lady. Harrison had graduated from Oxford, where she wrote film reviews for the student newspaper. In Britain Harrison worked as a copy editor before re-sponding to Hitchcock’s ąd for a“producer’s assistant.” She received cowrit-ing credit on the script for Hitchcock’s 1939 British film, Jamaica Inn. Harrison rosę from secretary to script reader / story analyst to screenwriter, moved with the prominent British producer-director to America, and col-laborated on Hitchcocka Hollywood gothic mystery films with female pro-tagonists and wartime espionage thrillers Foreign Correspondent (1940) and Saboteur (1942). Considerable media and press attention was given to Joan Harrison as Universal’s Phantom Lady project commenced in fali 1943 through its January 1944 ^rel^case- Not only did Harrison’s innovative role as female studio producer grant her rare, heightened creative control as a woman, but the former writer was also prominently regarded as Alfred Hitchcock’s protege. Such sought-after achievement and recognition for a female producer in the Hollywood studio system still held several chal-lenges, however. In a February 1944 interview with the Los Angeles Times Harrison described herself as a “thwarted writer.” She explained that her scripts had been so butchered that she had requested to have her name re-moved from the credits and became a producer to gain greater creative au-thority. When she was given the opportunity to produce, Harrison asserted, “the front office attitude resents a woman in authority and it probably al-ways will—they recognize women writers but prefer to keep us in pre-scribed groves [sic]. Some day they will have to admit that a woman can function successfully as an executive, too.”⁹ Harrison was known for keenly infusing the “women’s angle” into films, a particularly marketable skill dur-