Summary
In the chiaroscuro of post-war paranoia, Roma Winnet—novelist of the venomous heart—weds her placid counter-image, Bob Lawson, yet carries into marriage the corrosive ink of her own bestseller, Jealousy. When wartime cryptography summons Dave Blake to cloak-and-dagger shadows, he parks his fiancée—and Roma’s bosom confidante—Ethel Clarke beneath Bob’s allegedly protective roof. What follows is a danse macabre of glances: Venetian blinds slice moonlight into prison bars across Ethel’s startled cheekbones; Bob’s hushed briefings with the girl echo like gunshots inside Roma’s skull. Each clandestine upstairs creak detonates a fresh page in the author’s mental manuscript of betrayal. A forged plea for help lures Bob into a fog-choked dockside ambush where trench-coated phantoms trade Mauser rounds with the two friends; the set-piece erupts in Keystone-fast cross-cuts between knife arcs and semaphore lamp flashes. Bloodless but breathless, the men re-emerge to confront Roma’s wrath—no longer green-eyed monster but crimson-scaled Fury—until the marriage vows, once stretched on the rack of suspicion, snap back like a catapult, hurling the lovers into a clinch that feels less like reconciliation than exhausted surrender.
Synopsis
Roma Winnet, the author of Jealousy, loves and marries Bob Lawson, but worries that her own difficulties with that emotion will destroy their relationship. When Dave Blake enlists in the secret service, he entrusts Ethel Clarke, his girlfriend and Roma's best friend, to Bob's care, an arrangement that immediately causes Roma to fret. While on furlough, Dave goes to see Ethel at Bob's home, but the visit is cut short when Bob suspects that Dave is being followed by spies. The sight of Bob and Ethel together rouses Roma's jealousy, a state exacerbated by secret rendezvouses between Ethel, Bob and Dave. Convinced that her husband is having an affair, Roma threatens him with divorce. That night, Bob receives a frantic note, supposedly from Dave, but when he arrives at Dave's hide-out, he discovers that the note was a set-up. After a fierce battle with the spies, Dave and Bob escape unharmed. Once misunderstandings are cleared up, the wrath of love is quelled and Roma reunites with Bob.
