Black Widow 1954

Peter Denver, Van Heflin, a celebrated Broadway producer, attends a cocktail party hosted by the famous but icy actress Carlotta “Lottie” Marin, Ginger Rogers, and her quiet husband Brian Mullen, Reginald Gardiner. There he meets Nancy “Nanny” Ordway, Peggy Ann Garner, a naive twenty-year-old aspiring writer with big dreams in New York.

Nanny convinces Peter to ask Iris Denver, Gene Tierney, a fellow actress who is temporarily out of town, to permit Nanny to use the Denvers’ apartment for daytime writing. The arrangement seems innocent enough, but it places Nanny inside the private world of two famous performers and the creaking social circles around them.

After the Denvers return from the airport, they discover Nanny dead in their bathroom, and the apparent suicide quickly triggers a homicide investigation. Lt. Bruce, George Raft, the detective assigned to the case, begins to untangle a web of motives, suspicions, and connections, and he soon suspects that Peter may have had an affair with Nanny.

Peter evades arrest and teams up with Lt. Bruce to pursue the truth, diving into a tangle of relationships and recent encounters that Nanny had in New York. As they dig deeper, they reveal that Nanny’s outward naivety hid a more complicated life, one filled with people who might have had reasons to want her out of the way.

A series of flashbacks pieces together Nanny’s carefully crafted scheme: she had recently stayed with her uncle, then moved in with a woman roommate, and had agreed to marry the roommate’s brother. The story suggests a calculated plan to climb the social ladder and to cloak a secret lover by implicating Peter, all while quietly manipulating the people around her.

The autopsy confirms that Nanny was pregnant at the time of her death, adding urgency and shifting the implications of every relationship involved. Suddenly, everyone in Nanny’s orbit—especially those living in the same apartment building as the Denvers—becomes a potential suspect. In a tense exchange, Brian reveals to Peter that he was Nanny’s secret lover, though he swears he did not kill her.

Lt. Bruce intensifies the case, eventually leading to a confrontation that exposes the truth behind the seemingly connected lives. The final revelation arrives as Carlotta Marin—the glamorous, controlling Lottie—admits that she murdered Nanny to protect her marriage and to leverage the affair for blackmail. The deception is laid bare, and the murder is framed as a staged suicide, bringing the complex plot to a somber close.