“A wonderful noir” (Jonathan Rosenbaum), best seen in its baroque splendour on the big screen. “Your soul can undress in front of me,” the suavely sinister hypnotist Dr. Korvo (Jose Ferrer) assures just-caught klepto Ann Sutton (Tierney), pulling the emotionally troubled young woman into his diabolical plans to evade an ex-girlfriend with a $60,000 grievance. Ann finds herself swallowed in a whirlpool of deceit, blackmail, fraud, and murder, even as her famous psychoanalyst husband (Conte) attempts to extricate her, despite his suspicions of her infidelity with Korvo. Little wonder that such artists as Godard and Douglas Gordon have been drawn to Preminger’s perverse psychological thriller, so rich is its visual insinuation, so preposterously entertaining its plot twists. (Godard inserts a major homage to Whirlpool in Breathless, and Gordon doubled the film’s delirium in his celebrated 1999 twin-screen installation, left is right and right is wrong and left is wrong and right is right.) Shoplifting and a repressed daddy complex send the film on its haywire way to a bloody ending, but it is the double portrait of marriage – Tierney and Conte, police detective Charles Bickford and his dead wife – that gives Whirlpool its immense emotional undertow. (Sorry, it’s the kind of film that invites mixed metaphors!) The score is by David Raksin of Laura fame. “Tierney delivers what is probably (alongside her performance