Just as Kansas’s shapeshifting personas reflect the uneasy categorical structures of Phantom Lady, the film, too, masquerades in multiple genres, refusing to be contained by anything much resembling binary hierarchies. The night-time sequences riff off traditional noir motifs, complete with wet cobblestones, darkly lit corners, and a lonely figure wandering through the cityscape, but later scenes, such as when Kansas tracks down the mysterious lady, see the film embrace the conventions of melodrama. As she recalls the story of her husband’s tragic, sudden death—a scene that unfolds inside a woman’s bedroom stuffed with fluffy big pillows, a conspicuous number of flowers, and soft pleated drapes—her antics become overly theatrical, and she covers her face with both hands and emits a scream. This playful genre metamorphosis continues when Kansas confronts Jack and Phantom Lady becomes a horror film; as Jack inches towards Kansas, the lighting is especially stark, his figure appearing as monstrous as the bizarre sculptures scattered around his studio. Contemporary critics were understandably overwhelmed by this genre-hopping—one review, for example, begins with a comment on the horror-sounding title, and then proceeds to use numerous qualifiers to describe the film as a “top-notch psychological murder mystery melodrama packed with 87 minutes of action and suspense.”

Looking beyond the film’s elusive, chameleon-like text, Kansas’s process of circumventing different gendered personas can also be read as a metaphor for New York City as a boiling pot of diverse sexual identities; by the ’40s, the city had long been considered a haven for alternative sexualities. Drag shows, in which female performers put on tuxedos and crooned love songs, making the women in the audience swoon with pleasure, were particularly popular at this time. Kansas’s outfits, which flip between daytime workwear garb and a seductive night-time wardrobe, further denote the city’s schizophrenic identity. Kansas’s wanderings become a form of geographical mapping that documents its underground seediness—dingy bars, dirty subways, secret jazz clubs—as well as its socially respectable side, consisting of court rooms and brightly lit offices, a world associated with Scott. At she exclaims at one point, all he dreams of accomplishing is to “build model cities, sunlight in every room and children’s play yards everywhere for everyone”—an inherently heteronormative vision that clashes up against a world lived largely in the shadows. If Phantom Lady’s noir elements speak to the crisis of masculinity found in the 1940s, then its woman’s film components respond to the growing demographic of single working women, intruding upon the male-coded financial districts.

Curiously, the marketing for Phantom Lady differed from that of other murder mystery thrillers, aggressively targeting female moviegoers. One ad, for example, beckons its female readers to “hold up your Easter shopping until you see ‘Phantom Lady.’” The accompanying images are excessively feminine—instead of the male characters, the focus instead is placed on the kooky hat that haunts the film. The strategy, though unusual, is not so surprising considering that the film was helmed under a woman’s guide, namely producer Joan Harrison, one of the few female producers during the classical Hollywood era. Phantom Lady was Harrison’s first film as a producer, though she had gained much notoriety for being Hitchcock’s screenwriter on films such as Rebecca (1940), Foreign Correspondent (1940), Suspicion (1941) and more. In her comprehensive book on Harrison, Christina Lane argues that, though not a director, Harrison should be allowed to stake an authorial claim—especially on the films she produced. Lane suggests that Kansas was possibly the closest cinematic reflection of Harrison’s own life and personality. Indeed, like Kansas, Harrison started out as Hitchcock’s secretary before graduating to a more equal partnership with her boss. Harrison was also largely responsible for the expansion of Kansas’s character, who was only a minor figure in Cornell Woolrich’s source novel.

Following Phantom Lady, Raines would go on to star in Siodmak’s The Suspect (1944), The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (1945), and Time Out of Mind (1947), the first two being excellent noir-tinted films where she also plays professional working women whose presence throws the men in her lives into a state of crisis. If femme fatales typically operate as a mirror to the psychological neurosis endured by their male counterparts, the significance of Raines’s working women in these films extends far beyond the perception that they are “good girls,” and thus differentiated from the fallen women. Her fierce, independent presence accentuates the emasculation of the male characters, contributing to the heady brew of disorienting sexual politics inherent to Siodmak’s noirs. Like birds of a feather, Raines and Siodmak’s idiosyncratic genre experimentations have a spellbinding allure that does, indeed, succeed in breaking all the rules.

A Vietnamese film critic based in Paris, Phuong Le is a regular contributor to The Guardian, Sight & Sound, and other publications.