‘Niagara’ is very much a film noir, albeit one shot in glorious Technicolor, with the majesty and turbulence of the Niagara Falls providing the backdrop to this tangled murder story. It feels in many ways like a prototype for ‘Vertigo’. Indeed, there is even a bell tower sequence that anticipates Hitchcock’s later masterpiece, with the ringing bells signalling an assumed death and functioning almost as a marker of murder rather than the actual site of the crime. It also put me in mind of ‘Last Embrace’, the 1979 thriller starring Roy Scheider, which also includes a climactic setpiece on location at Niagara Falls.

Like ‘Vertigo’, this is a story in which murder refuses to unfold according to plan. Mistaken identity, deception and characters pretending to be something they are not are all classic film noir motifs, and they are used to great effect here. At the centre of it all is Marilyn Monroe, playing a woman who presents her husband – recently discharged from a veterans’ hospital – as unstable and potentially dangerous, while she herself is irredeemably manipulative. Monroe’s character arranges with her lover to have her husband killed, but the wrong body ends up in the morgue. The result is that a man presumed dead effectively returns like a ghost, pursuing his wife in an attempt to hold her accountable.

The second half of the film shifts into slightly different territory because, much like Hitchcock’s later work, one of the principal characters disappears from the narrative before the climax. The dynamic changes entirely, and although all the familiar noir ingredients remain, the film becomes something else. There are moments – including a tense motorboat sequence on the water – that reminded me strongly of ‘Cape Fear’, with its themes of vengeance and attempts to reckon with past wrongdoing.

An intriguing device is the introduction of an apparently innocent honeymooning couple who gradually become entangled in the drama. Their presence provides an outsider’s perspective and intensifies the suspense as they are drawn into the increasingly desperate stand-off that unfolds towards the end.

Monroe herself is electrifying. The film repeatedly aligns her with the natural spectacle of Niagara Falls: beautiful, overwhelming and potentially destructive. We see her as a force of nature, yet the screenplay offers little explanation for why she behaves as she does. Why is she so cruel? Why so calculating? In that respect, the mystery surrounding her character becomes part of the film’s allure. She remains unknowable, and Monroe plays directly into that enigmatic quality.

The result is a moody, stylish thriller that combines the fatalism of film noir with the vividness of Technicolor. Beneath the murder plot lies a fascinating study of illusion, obsession and the dangerous gap between appearance and reality.