Enjoyable noir with some surprising plot twists covering up the holes. Jose Ferrer is a quack psychotherapist who specializes in adjustment disorders of the rich. Gene Tierney, she of the supernal beauty, is married to a legitimate psychoanalyst, Richard Conte. Alas, because of some "childhood neurosis" she is a kleptomaniac and is afraid to tell her husband about it.<br /><br />When she is caught boosting an expensive pin from a jewelry shop, Ferrer intervenes and gets her out of trouble. He's all suavity and charm. He coaxes all her symptoms out of her -- the headaches, the thievery, the insomnia -- which she's been afraid to reveal because it might damage her husband's reputation and, presumably, his income.<br /><br />Ferrer secretly treats Tierney for a week or so, curing her of her headaches and insomnia. Of course Ferrer is not all he seems. Is any character with a name like "David Korvo" going to be what he seems? Among all the Coltons and Suttons in the rest of the flick? Fortunately, Ferrer is the right man for the role. One scan of a potential client and Ferrer knows all about her. He's like Sherlock Holmes. Nobody can sneer with such supercilious self satisfaction as Ferrer. (Sorry about that.) Can you imagine Ferrer playing a homeless and helpless vagrant full of ontological Angst? Anyway, Ferrer hypnotizes Tierney one time too many, so to speak, and she winds up the only suspect in the murder of a woman who was about to expose Ferrer for the woman-abusing blackmailing charlatan that he is. Ferrer is off the suspect list because he's been in the hospital recovering from gall bladder surgery. I don't think I want to get into the plot more than that because medical discretion forbids it.<br /><br />There's a lot of pop psychology hokum floating around in the story, which needn't be gone into except to say that hypnosis is a curious altered state of consciousness that isn't well understood at all. Some people are good subjects and some not. The good ones are really good. I used it in a class in hypnotherapy and in a 15-minute session helped a classmate cut his smoking in half, at least for a week or so. And there are documented instances of surgery being carried out with no other anesthetic. And there are clinical anecdotes written about bleeding during childbirth being shut down. Sometimes, with some people, it really WORKS. I'm not so sure about self hypnosis though. We'll know more, I guess, in another generation or so.<br /><br />Well, as a follow up to Preminger's "Laura" of a few years earlier, this doesn't quite clear the bar. "Laura" had something that this plot-driven story is weak in. I don't know exactly what it is. Ferrer may be a slimeball but he's not nearly as engaging as Clifton Webb's homosexual columnist in "Laura." And there isn't a moment in "Whirlpool" that is the equal of the scene in which Tierney reappears from the dead to find a half-drunk Dana Andrews sitting in her living room just after he's gone through her lingerie drawer.<br /><br />It's not a bad film though. The surprises are real enough and the story is engaging. Ferrer stands out as the heavy, Tierney with her little girl voice doesn't have to do much, and Richard Conte as the psychoanalyst is stolid, which is what the role calls for. Worth seeing.