The best scenes in "Sleep, My Love" come right away -- awaking on a train, our heroine (Claudette Colbert) can't remember how or why she got there, although an old woman on the train swears she saw her get on in Baltimore. Later, it turns out the woman is a plant, part of a scheme dreamed up by the woman's husband (Don Ameche) and an unscrupulous passport photographer (Ralph Morgan).Sadly, many of the film's moments that seem to be designed to be creepy or disturbing are unintentionally humorous. Ameche has a book about how to hypnotize people, and he uses it to try to lure Colbert into suicide. It's impossible not to laugh as he whispers next to her head while she sleeps, "go to the window, jump! jump!" Robert Cummings is equally ridiculous for most of the film's running time, although he does allow some interesting moments to creep in after he's discovered Ameche's plot and tries to trap him into revealing himself (he reveals a more forceful side than we usually see from Cummings). I've never been a huge fan of Colbert in anything other than comedy, as she just doesn't seem to me to have the face or the style for drama. She's a fine actress, but I just didn't see what Cummings was so crazy about. She seems much too much of a square. Rita Johnson is more interesting to me, sorry..... wish we had seen more of her in films, but she definitely had some talent and was camera friendly.

In maybe the only time he was a villain on screen Don Ameche uses his dapper charm against type playing a coldblooded man who is trying to drive his very rich wife Claudette Colbert out of her mind. Ameche has been thoroughly seduced by a sultry Hazel Brooks otherwise he'd probably stay a rich kept husband, it's Colbert who has all the bucks in the family.As part of his plan he has George Coulouris who took a patent out on sinister and who is a photographer in real life going in the guise of a psychiatrist. That and some psychotropic drugs administered and a little amnesia have Colbert thinking she is indeed ready for the rubber room.Sleep My Love is a combination of Gaslight and Dial M For Murder and the comparisons are obvious since Bob Cummings plays the same kind of role in both films, the sympathetic friend who gives the heroine a shoulder to cry on. He's a bit more proactive in this film than in the Hitchcock classic as he figures out slowly that Colbert is not just imagining things.Keye Luke has a role of companion 'brother' to Cummings. In fact Colbert and Cummings attend his wedding during the film. What was nice here was that his role was stereotypical in no way. Luke was not constantly make a mess that Charlie Chan would have to straighten out.As much as the stars give good performances, you will remember Hazel Brooks from this film more than anyone. How a sexy woman like that never had a major career one can only wonder.Arise My Love was a United Artists release and produced by one of the founding mothers of the studio Mary Pickford. A role she might well have played in the later stages of her career. And Hitchcock himself couldn't have done better with the suspense.

We're into familiar territory again with this would-be sleeper about a woman being drugged by her husband (DON AMECHE) for her inheritance and trying all manner of tricks to get her to think she's going insane.It all has a familiar ring--although this time, under Douglas Sirk's direction, it's all much too contrived and not too convincing in its execution.CLAUDETTE COLBERT is the poor victimized wife (but she's no Ingrid Bergman) and the cast-against-type DON AMECHE is much too affable to be chilling as the husband, unlike CHARLES BOYER in "Gaslight". Interestingly, ROBERT CUMMINGS is playing the same sort of role he essayed years later in "Dial M For Murder" whereby he helped Grace Kelly who was caught up in a sinister plot by her husband. Whatever, he's still pretty bland.In fact, that's the trouble with the whole film. It's bland despite the makings of a plot that should be mystifying and terrifying. Maybe a director other than Sirk could have done things with the bare bones of the story that would have turned it into the kind of chiller it's striving to be.Summing up: Not really worth your time.

Alison Courtland wakes up on a train headed out of New York, with a gun in her bag and no idea how she got there with her last memory being of falling asleep in her bed at home with her husband Richard. While Richard calls the police to report her disappearance, Alison heads home by plane with her new acquaintance Bruce. With Alison sent to a psychiatrist to help her work out what is happening inside her head that is causing her to have these episodes, Richard sneaks off with his glamorous but demanding lover, Daphne.Could Alison's episodes have a less medical cause and a more sinister one?Douglas Sirk himself has acknowledged that this is far from being one of his best films but this still has just about enough going for it to be worth seeing. The basic story opens with a really enticing and intriguing scene on the train that offered so much in the way of mystery that it was never going to be able to live up to it. And so the film very quickly becomes a pretty obvious thriller that throws in some genre clichés from noir films but never really gets gripping, dark or thrilling enough to really make a mark. The story never seems to get going because it has no real mystery to it and the only people in the world that don't catch on quickly are Alison and Bruce; this is a problem because we're meant to be going along with them and be involved but instead we are miles ahead of them and just waiting to see how it ends (although we suspect we roughly know). The characters are too thinly painted to make the film work as a noir and throwing a 'paint by the numbers' femme fatale into the mix doesn't do it either.This is not to say it is without merit because it isn't. At times it is still atmospheric (although never as good as the opening scene or two) and it does do enough to provide entertainment for a few hours but just not as much as it could have done. The fault is not really the actors because the material is pretty run of the mill and doesn't give them a lot of room to lift it. Hence we have Colbert playing a clean cut innocent type without really doing anything of interest with it while Cummings doesn't have a dark bone in his body with a clean all-American type. Ameche at least has something interesting to do and he paints his character as scheming but easily pathetic and hemmed in, in the arms of Daphne. Brooks' Daphne is right out of the noir playbook and is dull and lifeless as a result. Coulouris and Smith have a bit of fun and deliver enjoyable performances with too little screen time but that's about it. Generally the cast can do little because they have been given little.Overall this is a watchable film but the plot is obvious from the start and the script doesn't really deliver anything in the way of tension or complexity and instead paints everything with broad strokes whether it be simple characters (Alison and Bruce) or genre clichés (femme fatale and man in spell of femme fatale). Sirk's direction is still good and he uses darkness and lighting pretty well to cover some of the film with a bit of atmosphere but he himself has derided this film and I for one am not going to disagree with him to any great extent.