Val Lewton's Please Believe Me.

Lewton's fragmented mosaic story-telling is, obviously, not well suited to comedy, where pace must be built and maintained.
Joel Siegel, Val Lewton:  The Reality of Terror (Viking Press,1973)

One of the many pleasures of the estimable Turner Classic Movies is the rare and unusual films that show up there, including Lewton's penultimate film, Please Believe Me (1950).  I don't know if there are still many people who believe, as writer Gore Vidal did, that movies are the vision of the producer rather than the director, but Please Believe Me had possibilities that were never realized, mainly because of the poor direction of Norman Taurog, a totally undistinguished director who directed nine Elvis Presley movies.  For his low-budget horror films Cat People (1941), I Walked With a Zombie (1942), and The Leopard Man (1943) Lewton used director Jacques Tourneur, who shared his subtle touch with the fears just below the surface of everyday life.  When RKO promoted Tourneur to A movies Lewton used first-time director Mark Robson to direct the elegant and scary The Seventh Victim (1943), maintaining strict control of the script. There are themes in Please Believe Me which obviously interested Lewton -- deception, an individual's identity, conflicts between England and America -- and I think they could have been brought out in an amusing way by the right director, with Lewton's supervision.  He tailored the script for the delightful Deborah Kerr and was able to keep her as the star, but Taurog was unable to bring out her charm or adopt Lewton's vision.