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ing the war. Yet rather than standard female melodrama, Harrison’s inter-est was in crime, notably crime a bit darker than the converitional weepie.

Universal publicized Phantom Lady as an innovative mystery drama from a woman’s point of view, “based on feminine psychology for its essen-tial appeal,” describing this “formula” for the film as “never before... trans-lated for the screen.” Its narrative is “in no sense a ‘horror’ film, nor is it just another‘whodunit’ of the cops-and-criminals pattern,” but rather a “highly ingenious tale dealing with the obstacles to justice often presented by chance, circumstance and human psychology.” Studio press books pro-moted the female protagonist’s independence and determination. Publicity heralded the films “spirited” and “level-headed” heroine as “wholly un-stereotyped” in an “adventure into the mystic realm of psychological conflict, rather than the ordinary crime detective thriller.”¹⁰ Louis Black ob-serves that Phantom Lady “differs dramatically” from other noir films be-cause it refrains from “portraying women as the bitch goddesses of the hard-boiled tradition” to, instead, depict independent women “rather benevolently.”ⁿ Tapping wartime working-women audiences, publicity noted a female player’s former wartime occupation in “Girl Quits Truck for Film Career” The film’s promotion recognizes Harrison as a forerunner in female studio producers and describes her casting an actress who could dress plainly without being “glamorous” in the role. Consistent with an ef-fort to target an employed female audience “getting their hands dirty” dur-ing wartime military production, it ąuotes Harrison explaining the part to Raines: “I told Ella the girl in ‘Phantom Lady’ would have to be madę quite plain, that the naturę of the character wouldnt permit her to be beautiful. That her clothes would be ordinary, some of them downright shabby.” A March 29,1944, Los Angeles Times review of Phantom Lady even describes the film as “the story of a girl who goes to the defense of her employer when he is accused of murder and helps discover a maniacal killer.”¹²

Phantom Lady was progressive for its innovative creative authority granted a woman, its stark noir style, and its central, active female protag-onist. In fact, a February 28,1944, Life magazine article, “Ella Raines: The Pretty Young Star of‘Phantom Lady’ Began Her Career by Being Incorpo-rated for $1,000,000 by a Production Firm,” said it all. The piece highlighted a photo-feature of Phantom Lady star Ella Raines. It described how the twenty-two-year-old former University of Washington drama coed was ini-tially signed and “incorporated” by Howard Hawks and Charles Boyer as the “sole asset” of their independent producing company, B-H Productions, Inc. Hawks and Boyer then “passed her [Raines] on” to Universal for the role of the assertive, resourceful independent female protagonist in Harri-

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son and Siódmak’s film. (The feature also madę surę to mention Raines’s military husband, “bemedaled captain in the Army Air Forces,” being or-dered back to duty during their wartime honeymoon—an obvious human-interest item to the prominently female domestic audience.)¹³ The business strategy of “woman as independent production commodity” highlighted in the article is certainly noteworthy. Like Selznick, Hawks purchased, “owned,” developed, and refined new feminine star talent, grooming ac-tresses and “manufacturing” female screen images—as Selznick “madę” starlets and loaned them to other studios, Hawks sold his actresses’ con-tracts to various Hollywood studios and madę a profit.

Despite Harrison’s position of production authority, Universal capital-ized on her femininity and attractive physicality in studio publicity designed to mold, promote, and “package” the female producer and to provide a novel industry production image for the studio. Much like Columbia glam-orized production executive Virginia Van Upp, Universal marketed Harri-son’s gender as a desirable young female producer. Studio publicity noted: “A girl with wavy blonde hair, dimples and a 24-inch waistline could enter-tain people with something besides crime stories. But not Joan Harrison. She lives and breathes crime—in her imagination, of course—and then tells it to others via the motion picture screen. Miss Harrison is a woman movie producer, one of the few in Hollywood. Her feminine slant has added fresh-ness to ‘cops and robbers’ plots.”¹⁴    _v

Publications often capitalized on emphasizing the producer’s feminine “allure.” One piece even madę a point of publicizing Harrison’s “ah-inspir-ing legs.” Harrison, however, referred to herself as a “specialist” in psycho-logical crime narratives, explaining, “I don’t want to make pictures with the Andrews sisters.”¹⁵ In an October 23,1944, article for the Hollywood Reporter entitled “Why I Envy Men Producers,” Harrison facetiously commented on the wartime challenges facing a woman producing in the Hollywood studio system in the 1940S. She complained that men producers “don’t care if nylons ever come back”; furthermore, the “shortage of girdles doesn’t even attract their attention in the newspapers.” She adds that her wartime małe counterparts are not even “disturbed” if the “laundry’s making confetti of the linen sheets, which can’t be replaced in these times,” nor do they “worry about menus or stretch ration points.”¹⁶ The war-related scarcity of ra-tioned materials influenced 1940S fashions and simplified Hollywood cos-tume designs, paring down wardrobes and eliminating an array of garment items—unexpectedly aiding the intended heightening of ćroticism in wartime films. Lana Turner’s bare legs (which were safely covered in coarse rayon hose for a close-up) and midriff in The Postman Always Rings Twice