No Man's Woman

Above average murder mystery about a greedy, scheming woman who 'gets it' and the cops think the husband did it.

Nothing original, but the film is a sprint from start to finish so you shouldn't get bored. For a supposedly 'B movie', this has an excellent cast of players. Lots of pretty girls, weather beaten cops and a hunk or two for the womenfolk...

Marie Windsor is particularly fun to watch playing the manipulative wife... which she did twice, a year later, in Kubrick's 'The Killing' and Corman's 'Swamp Women'. (I wonder what she was like in real life!)

The first half of the movie presents the case for 'offing' the nasty woman and the second half is spent finding out who-dunnit. The running time of just over an hour goes by quickly, there's not a moment wasted. You won't be disappointed in this 'Perry Mason' style caper.

Marie Windsor, who had already made an impression as a self-serving and blundering undercover policewoman in NARROW MARGIN (US 1952), gets to have an even more selfish and self-serving role in NO MAN'S WOMAN.

She thinks nothing of cheating on hubby John Archer while refusing to divorce him, to try a new affair with her employee's fiancé, and to kick her journalist lover out when he is fired for breaching his professional duties in a bid to assist Windsor with the sale of her paintings.

Windsor so commands this film that it never quite recovers from her demise. Archer, with a voice that resembles that of the voiceover one hears in many of the B pics of the time, fails to get my sympathy the moment he takes to drinking, classy Patrick Knowles tries his best but his part is not the most endearing, and Jill Jarmyn just cannot act to save her life.

Thankfully, cinematography is competent and Adreon does his best with limited acting resources and a script with some clever twists. Short, not sweet, but NO MAN'S WOMAN merits watching.

Marie Windsor stars as Carolyn Ellenson Grant, a nasty selfish lady. Her husband is desperate to divorce her, but she refuses and lives a completely separate life on his money. She also has a lover who she uses ruthlessly to get what she wants and along the way she decides to destroy a few lives for kicks. Eventually, she is killed and the police think the husband did it...not realizing practically EVERYONE had motives to do it! Can the poor hubby manage to prove his innocence?

The first portion of the film is more enjoyable than the last...though it is overall a very good movie. Watching Windsor playing such a conniving and god-awful person is incredibly enjoyable and it's a part that Joan Crawford could have done well in at this time...though Windsor was quite convincing. Worth seeing...and a bit like film noir in many ways.

Marie Windsor is a piece of work. She's living apart from her husband, John Archer, but taking half his earnings. He wants to get married to Nancy Gates, so he asks Miss Windsor for a divorce. She wants a continuing half his earnings, plus $300,000 in cash; his father can sell his half of the business. Meanwhile, Miss Windsor is partners in an art gallery with Patrick Knowles, and putting the moves on Richard Crane, who's engaged to her assistant, Jil Jarmyn. In fact, she's just got Miss Jarmyn to return her engagement ring by telling her she's carrying on an affair with Crane.

So naturally she's shot by someone standing just offscreen. Enter the police.

It's a cheaply shot Republic B movie, and while everyone is decent, their line deliveries are rather declamatory. It's directed by Franklin Adreon(1902-1979). He had been writing Republic serials since 1937, and had directed a few for a couple of years. Now he was directing movies, and television, but it looks like the habits of the serials had stuck with him: grind them out cheap, grind them out fast and don't worry about the nuances. It's a well-written mystery, but the execution of the film is dull, except for Miss Windsor and her nasty attitude. I'd've shot her myself.

As mysteries go, No Man's Woman runs in the league of those populous puzzles that fueled so many old Perry Mason episodes: a lot of suspects, one of whom will be fingered. But the movie preserves a starring performance by Marie Windsor, one of the all-time great broads of post-war poverty-row movies. She leads in more of them than one might think, most of them obscure (if not vanished) westerns, sci-fi cheapies, and crime programmers. But, top billing or not, we get to see less of Windsor in No Man's Woman that we might like – too many people want her dead.

Among them: her industrialist husband (John Archer) whom she won't divorce unless he forks over a ruinous settlement; his girlfriend (Jil Jarmyn), whose pleas Windsor coldly rebuffs; Windsor's art critic paramour/business partner (Patric Knowles), who writes puff-pieces for her gallery and gets fired for conflict of interest (today they'd call it `synergy'); her loyal young assistant (Nancy Gates), whose fiancé she blithely tries to steal; and the fiancé (Richard Crane), onto whose boat she invites herself in order to seduce then blackmail him.

Windsor, as one exchange between characters goes, is `a witch...whichever way it's spelled.' When her wicked-woman machinations have reached the boil, and just about everyone has indiscreetly remarked how they'd like to see her dead, a 3-a.m. intruder into her studio grants their wishes. And so the search for the murderer is on....

Much like the roles Joan Crawford at this juncture in her career was playing in A-productions, Windsor's character is that of an honey-voiced schemer hiding her self-interest beneath a facade of piss-elegance – with every petty victory, the huge orbs of her eyes flash with satisfaction. She was more memorable in The Narrow Margin and The Killing (better movies), but what she delivers makes one wonder why she never broke out of the B-movie ghetto.