Sleep My Love
Directed by Douglas SirkAlison Courtland wakes aboard a Boston-bound train in the small hours, disoriented and without any account of how she came to be there. She is a wealthy New York socialite married to Richard Courtland, a man of surface charm and considerable means. A chance encounter with Bruce Elcott, a straightforward young businessman, brings her home – but the episode refuses to resolve itself into mere sleepwalking, and Alison's unease about her own household begins to harden into something she cannot yet name.
Richard is not what he presents. Behind the domestic façade he maintains for Alison's benefit, he is conducting an affair with Darlene, an actress he intends to install in Alison's place – and her money. To that end, he has enlisted the services of Charles Vernay, a photographer with a sideline in hypnosis and pharmaceutical suggestion, and a compliant physician named Dr. Rhinehart. The scheme is patient and systematic: Alison is being conditioned, episode by episode, toward an apparent breakdown or worse, while Richard's associate Jimmie Lin moves quietly at the edges of the plot.
Sleep My Love belongs to the cycle of postwar domestic-threat pictures – sometimes called the 'gaslight' subgenre – in which the home itself becomes the site of psychological warfare and the husband the most dangerous figure in a woman's life. Sirk, still finding his footing in Hollywood after his German career, turns the material toward a critique of bourgeois marriage and inherited wealth that would become more overt in his later work. The film holds its menace in the gap between Alison's cultivated composure and the machinery operating just beneath her perception.
