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Certainly he has succeeded in elevating Miss Gardner to the status of a first-magnitude star as the sirenic femme fatale who is the picture’s heroine, while he has also provided James Mason with one of his best latter-day characters.

It’s sirenic, a call to blindness, a “happy” filter placed on a world that is often good but frequently not.

One instinctively pictures a svelte form, a "face that launched a thousand ships," and all the rest of the sirenic paraphernalia that instinctively attach themselves to one's mental vision of a wholesale fracturer of hearts.

It causes the naturalist much amusement to watch the habits of this pretty little Owl, that, perched perfectly motionless on a branch, utters such a sirenic cry as to attract little birds in great numbers.

I also observed little birds mobbing it, when it perched in a conspicuous place in the daytime, as they always mob small birds of prey, but was not so fortunate as to hear the “sirenic cry” with which the Cordova bird fascinates its victims.