Program Notes

During World War II a cycle of popular films dealt with seemingly respectable men in respectable households who for various aberrated reasons murdered their respectable wives, other members of the family or servants (Gaslight, The Suspect, The Spiral Staircase, etc). In The Two Mrs. Carrolls (Warner Brothers, 1947), directed by Peter Godfrey, based on the play by Martin Vale, Geoffrey Carroll (Humphrey Bogart) is a psychotic artist who has slowly killed his first wife with poisoned milk after she served as the model for his portrait “The Angel of Death”. He tries to do the same to his second wife (Barbara Stanwyck) after falling in love with the predatory female next door (Alexis Smith) in the 1943 play starring Elizabeth Bergner. The first Mrs. Carroll manages to survive the slow poisoning and eventually warns her successor. In the film version the first wife is not seen, as she dies off screen near the beginning of the picture.

Franz Waxman had been through all this before having composed the scores for Rebecca, Suspicion, (remember the staircase scene with the glass of milk?) and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (the Spencer Tracey version). Waxman was very much a product of the neo-romantic German school, his style being texturally rich and strongly expressive in melodic lines.

After setting a portentous mood, Waxman underscores an idyllic sequence on the Scottish countryside between Geoffrey and the second Mrs. Carroll. They take cover in a nearby cave when it begins to rain. Much later in the film Mr. Carroll realizes that her husband has been giving her poison in her evening glass of milk. She throws it out the window but Geoffrey notices the spilled milk on the window cill, and, realizing she knows his intentions, decides in his unbalanced mind, to kill her that evening. Afraid for her life , she refuses him entrance into her locked bedroom and then is terrified to see him crashing through the window. He tries to strangle her, but she is rescued by an old friend and the police. His sanity completely gone, Geoffrey is taken away.

– Rudy Behlmer