“It is mostly a story about a young woman and a woman’s hat.
Miss Raines, made quite plain for the purpose, is the young woman, in love with a guiltless man condemned to die for the murder of his wife, because no one, including the jurors, believes his alibi that he was with a nameless woman wearing a silly hat at the time the crime was wrought.
Motivated by love for her man, and bulwarked by a stubborn conviction, typically feminine , in his innocence, Ella starts a race against the hangman. Undismayed by the seemingly hopelessness of her task, as women seldom are, she seeks to track down the “Phantom Lady” who appears meanwhile to have been swallowed in oblivion, and to prove that the doomed man, who is Alan Curtis, wasn’t lying about the funny hat, after all.” (Review copy from newspapers in 1944)