Inner Sanctum (1948 film)

A murderer is on the run and hiding out in a small town. As the story progresses, a boy who is sharing his room with the stranger realises he has witnessed the man killing a woman. The story begins on a train at night where an elegantly dressed woman meets another passenger, a mysterious stranger. She is fascinated when he is able to predict every shake and bump of the train, and every flickering moment of darkness, an instant before they occur, although he claims he has never ridden on this train before. He is evidently gifted with some sort of second sight. He offers to tell her a story about events that began at some unspecified time at the next station. The scene then shifts to acting out this narrative, which starts with Harold Dunlap inadvertently killing a woman with whom he has had a violent fight on the station platform. He places her body on the open rear end of a departing train and then goes in search of a boarding house where he can hide out for a time. There he encounters a young woman, Jean Maxwell, with whom he appears to fall in love, and the young boy who saw him at the station. He attempts to silence the boy, but is revealed as the murderer when the boy is rescued. Resigned to his fate, Harold waits with Jean until the police arrive to arrest him. After the film returns to the present, it is revealed that the mysterious stranger has an immediate and compelling interest in telling the story, and warns the woman not to get off the train when it stops. Instead, she spots her former fiancé and leaves the train, where they fight and he kills her, revealing that she was the murder victim of the stranger's story. ==Cast==