B-film maverick Joseph H. Lewis delivered a low-rent yet brilliantly stylized reply to Rebecca and Gaslight starring a sensitive Nina Foch, in her debut role, as a young woman abducted to a seaside mansion to play the role of an already dead woman and victim of a sinister scheme. With George Macready as a knife-wielding psychotic man-child and Dame May Whitty as his coddling elderly mother, My Name is Julia Ross releases the Gothic spirits of the Forties woman-trapped-in-an-old-house cycle into a brisk thriller animated by comically irreverent touches. True to its boldly assertive title, My Name is Julia Ross flaunts the rich potential of the B-film to act as a revealingly distorting mirror of the more predictable big-budgeted A-films. Indeed, scenes of Foch pulling apart the wall panels and staircases to discover secret passages seem to subversively celebrate the threadbare sets of Lewis’ low-budget production. An unexpected breakout hit, the film was so popular it was elevated by Columbia to an A-feature and moved to the prestigious top half of double bills.

One of the great delights of the B-film is that rare chance to see a favorite character actor elevated to a starring role, like menacing tough guy Charles McGraw’s transformation into a bulletproof cop in Armored Car Robbery, or Hungarian émigré Steven Geray, the suave maître d’ and waiter in countless pictures, now cast as a Parisian detective whose engagement to a small-town innkeeper’s daughter is shattered by her gruesome murder. Determined to catch the killer, Geray embarks on a strange and twisting path, interrogating subjects while his criminal prey remains always one step away. In this stylish follow-up to his breakthrough hit, the Gothic plot-twister My Name is Julia Ross, Joseph H. Lewis makes clear his wild talent for the unexpected stories and bold mise-en-scène that give his films the giddy intensity so beloved by true cinephiles. Regularly rediscovered as a cult classic, So Dark the Night drew the attention of Columbia executives who began to unsuccessfully groom Lewis for bigger-budget assignments that he would steadfastly resist out of reluctance to surrender the creative freedom he found on the lower rungs of the hierarchical studio ladder.