If it wasn't, it was close to being, and it shows, in the sometimes awkward or unfulfilled uses of the wide screen, which make more evident the ways this plays more like a stage drama than a film.
"Believe not what you only wish to believe, but that which truth demands"
Maybe the first in Cinemascope, I'm not sure. But there's another widescreen format that made use of the murder mystery genre that same year – Vista Vision – used in REAR WINDOW, released the same year.
Please excuse typos/funny wording; I use speech-recognition that doesn't always recognize!
Good sleuthing! "Rear Window" was actually first released in the U.S. two months before "Black Widow", though of course, being in VistaVision, its widescreen ratio wasn't as pronounced as that of CinemaScope.
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