Richard Wanley, Edward G. Robinson, a reserved college professor, sends his wife and two children away for a vacation and slips into a quiet evening at his club with friends. While there, he notices a striking oil portrait of Alice Reed, Joan Bennett, hanging in a storefront window nearby. The painting becomes a topic of conversation as Wanley and his companions discuss its allure and the mystery surrounding its subject. Wanley remains at the club, reading the intimate verses of Song of Songs, yet the image of Reed lingers in his mind. Later, when he steps outside, Reed herself is there, observing the crowd around the painting, and she persuades Wanley to join her for drinks.
What begins as an awkward, chance encounter soon spirals into danger. Reed’s powerful, clandestine lover, Claude Mazard, arrives unannounced, and a volatile confrontation erupts. In self-defense, Wanley kills Mazard. The two of them quickly decide to cover up the fatal incident, and Wanley helps Reed dispose of the body in the countryside. The plan should bring relief, but it only attracts trouble. Wanley discovers that there are clues left behind and that several people may have witnessed what happened.
At the center of the investigation is District Attorney Frank Lalor, Raymond Massey, a shrewd prosecutor who knows Wanley only as a friend from the club. Lalor’s inquiry advances with quiet persistence, drawing Wanley back into the crime scene as a sort of uneasy ally rather than a suspect. Wanley’s usually steady manners begin to falter as he slips into moments of unintentional confession, hinting that he might know far more than a bystander should.
As the case unfolds, Reed becomes the target of pressure from Heidt, a crooked former cop hired to shadow Mazard. Heidt’s demands and threats complicate the couple’s already precarious situation. Wanley and Reed debate how to blunt the blackmail, and Wanley concludes that eliminating Heidt might be the only way to end the danger. Reed supplies Heidt with a powdered drug through a thin, carefully disguised prescription, hoping to quiet him for good. When Heidt returns to collect payment, he drinks the tainted concoction and seems to stumble into the trap Reed has laid, only to die in a subsequent shootout just after leaving Reed’s house. The police, misled by the sequence of events, conclude that Heidt was Mazard’s killer, not Reed’s accomplice.
The emotional weight of the night crashes down when Reed, realizing the law is closing in and that Wanley’s nerves are stretched to a breaking point, calls him with news of the failed attempts. Wanley, overwhelmed, overdoses on the remaining powder and appears to die in his own apartment. But in a startling turn, a match cut reveals that Wanley is alive, waking up at the club where the events began. He has been dreaming, the entire drama unfolding as a dream in which the club’s staff and patrons—employees and regulars alike—were cast as the players in his imagined crime. The revelation shifts the entire story from a literal murder mystery to a fatal dreamlike meditation on temptation, guilt, and the blurred line between reality and imagination.
Stepping out into the street after the revelation, Wanley clutches the painting’s memory but refuses a stranger’s request for a light, a tiny, stubborn act of defiance that underscores his return to a more cautious, still-toned existence.
