David Miller’s Sudden Fear takes just a shade too long to get moving, but once it does, you forgive it all its throat-clearing and feet-shuffling. In the last two-thirds or so, the tension is sublime, the plotting is clever, and Joan Crawford is breathtakingly expressive. Most film noir directors would give us Crawford’s voiceover; Miller is sharp enough to just give us Crawford and let her face speak volumes.

Crawford stars as playwright (and heiress) Myra Hudson. Myra is responsible for hit after hit, and her instincts are good–at least when it comes to the stage. She knows that Lester Blaine (Jack Palance), with his fair acting but limited sex appeal, isn’t the romantic lead her latest play needs, so Lester gets the boot … but not before he makes a whiny speech about how she clearly doesn’t know that Casanova wasn’t that good-looking himself.

But Casanova had charisma, and Lester doesn’t. Palance does–but not until the role switches gears. Like his character, he truly is an unconvincing romantic lead here, and when he eventually engineers a “genuine” off-stage romance with Myra–essentially stalking her on a long train journey from New York to San Francisco and winning her heart in the process–it’s hard to say what she sees in him. Even when he’s making a deliberate siege on her affections, his playbook is full of passive-aggressive sulks and forced, charmless interludes. But soon enough, Lester has his marriage. Let’s just say that poor Myra is overworked and not at her best.

This all drags. It’s fine for us to suspect from the start that Lester’s motives are far from pure, but he should at least have charm; he needs to seduce us, not just Myra. Palance, alas, only hits the right notes once he starts openly playing the heavy–but then he hits them very well.

As soon as Myra finds out–in a predictably set up but nonetheless stunning sequence–that her husband (and his real lover, Gloria Grahame’s equally savage and venal Irene) wants her dead, Sudden Fear puts the pedal to the floor. There’s a ticking clock. There’s a desperate need for Myra to summon all her courage, intelligence, and composure. This is where the lack of voiceover really works wonders, because we find out Myra’s plan slowly, in bits and pieces, and each revelation is its own separate delight. Miller’s instinct for suspense is so refined that certain nerve-wracking scenes–particularly Lester tucking Myra into bed and one bit involving a wind-up toy dog–border on horror.

It feels like you can see the specter of the Hays Code towards the end, arranging things a little too neatly and sanitizing them a little too much, but what we have is still gripping, memorable, and an immense pleasure to watch. As a cherry on top, it comes with a final lingering shot–of Crawford’s face, of course–that deserves noir immortality.

Sudden Fear is streaming on Kanopy.