Edward G Robinson as Professor Richard Wanley bids farewell to his wife and two children at the railway station - his life is in order, everything is fine - until he sees the portrait in the window next door to his club of a modestly beautiful young woman, heavily framed in gilt. Frame within a frame within a frame. And then, on the surface of the glass, he sees the face of the same woman reflected, only more ghostly. It is the face of Joan Bennett, as Alice Reed, who is flattered to find she has an admirer. Perhaps it is the older man's evident besottedness at her portrait which charms her to invite him out for a drink.
Women who chat men up and ask them out for a drink, I've always had a soft spot for them. And then she buys him another, and another, and despite his clubmen friends' warning not to make a fool of himself with younger women now that he has passed forty, Wanley goes back to her apartment where he settles down to enjoy another cocktail. Suddenly in bursts another gentleman caller, irate Claude Mazard (Arthur Loft), incensed to discover that his mistress is entertaining at this very late hour another admirer.
His temper gets the better of him: he pins Edward G to the couch, his hands around his neck, and seems intent on strangling him, when Joan Bennett's Alice Reed hands him the scissors, and before you can say "Fritz Lang!" the job is done and Claude is a dead man.
The couple then must figure out how to dispose of the body without leaving evidence for the investigators, not yet realising who the victim is a well-known, wealthy corporate tycoon, and that he has a bodyguard following him everywhere.
Professor Wanley's drinking buddy just happens to be the D.A. (Raymond Massey) and talks him through the investigation process, which takes place at a lick, almost turning Edward G's hair white. And the couple's attempts to get the better of the situation don't go too well.
The plot veers towards classic film noir: Joan Bennett is the femme and if the film followed through to its logical end then Edward G would be fatale, but for reasons that may have been due to its late-wartime period, then movie does not end in disaster (like DOA, Double Indemnity, Gun Crazy, Detour). But the charm of the piece is in the pacing, the graceful movement towards and away from the original murder, the elegance of Edward G Robinson's character under stress, the simple plain-beauty of Joan Bennett's Alice, the nobility of the original conceit: to fall in love with a work of art, to fall in love with the woman in the work of art, to behave heroically when placed in crisis by that love, all this your average passionate moviegoer can find it in his heart to admire. This must be Fritz Lang's most likeable film.