Danger Woman

The title of this elusive Universal B film tantalizes with the promise of Patricia Morison reprising her role as the female Moriarty who gave Basil Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes a run for his money in DRESSED TO KILL. No such luck. As it turns out DANGER WOMAN finds Morison less of a femme fatale as she a philandering housewife; the film itself is less of a hardboiled espionage thriller than a domestic melodrama. Yet this potboiler still attracts minor interest to baby-boomers as one of the handful of non-horror films which found it's way into Screen Gem's famous "Shock Theater" package which help jump start the monster craze in the late fifties.

DANGER WOMAN was, in addition, one of the first Hollywood movies out of the gate to incorporate atomic energy into its plot although it mainly functions as a classic Hitchcock maguffin, setting the wheels of the plot into motion without having any particular thematic interest. Don Porter, we're told, is one of the masterminds of the A-Bomb who now is seeking to refine atomic power for industrial applications. He gets sidetracked when his estranged wife, Morison, who left him years earlier for a string of paramours while he was off splitting atoms, arrives on the scene hoping for a reconciliation. Shortly after, Porter suddenly finds his life in a tailspin. His relations with his live-in secretary Brenda Joyce become fodder for local gossip, promised research grants evaporate and agents of unspecified origins come out of the woodwork, trying to hijack his secrets.

Once you get over the novelty of a Universal film of this vintage featuring familiar studio stock players such as Milburn Stone and Samuel S. Hinds waxing earnestly about The Bomb, DANGER WOMAN isn't much. A deep-dyed B film with a 60-minute running time and the action rarely straying from the hero's living room, the shudder-hungry Shock Theater audiences of the fifties must have been tuning out in record numbers. It's not particularly bad in the way that Universal programmers of the 40s often were, it's just so resolutely small-scale and unambitious. The script can't even decide if the villains are in the employee of an evil corporate empire or an unnamed foreign government. Morison spends most of her time playing down her reputation as a fallen woman, regularly getting stern rebukes from the maid Kathleen Howard (W.C. Fields' wife in IT'S A GIFT) while the rest of the characters eye her as a moral leper. Morison's involvement in the main action of the film comes so late and tentatively that her title DANGER WOMAN hardly seems warranted. Brenda Joyce, her opposite, is The Good Girl and she's little more than The Stepford Secretary, fawning all over her boss, belittling her own intelligence (with good reason) and virtuous to the point of being a nuisance. It's very much a picture of it's time. A hardcore Universal completest may still find it mildly entertaining.

I was lucky enough to meet Don Porter on a golf course once and he was a genuine nice guy. He was a little shy about his career, but later when I looked him up I figured he should have been more proud. But now, after seeing this 59m "B" film where he was the star I think maybe this may have been why he was not egotistical. This little film suffers from slow pacing and direction, corny dialogue delivered in a stilted manner by uninspired actors. It could be a case where the producer thought over powering music and the potential of the idea of nuclear energy expanded this mostly stage bound drama. Unfortunately it plays more like a soap opera than a thriller. I gave it a 5 out of 10 mostly because I thought the idea for the story had merit and deserves to be remade and maybe this time the music could be turned down a little.

Released in the summer of 1946, "Danger Woman" was the last title included in Universal's popular SHOCK! package of classic horror films issued to television in the late 50's. Clearly a non horror item, despite a fine veteran cast familiar to Universal buffs, starring Don Porter ("Mystery of the White Room," "Night Monster," "She-Wolf of London") as Professor Claude Ruppert, an atomic researcher who decides to shelve his findings because they would prove devastating in the wrong hands. Lovely Patricia Morison ("Hitler's Madman," "Calling Dr. Death," "Dressed to Kill," "Song of the Thin Man," "Tarzan and the Huntress") is billed third in the title role, as Ruppert's estranged wife Eve, who suddenly turns up after a three year absence, interrupting the idyllic existence between her husband and his loving secretary June Spencer (Brenda Joyce, "Strange Confession," "Pillow of Death"). The real trouble begins with the arrival of enemy spy Gerald King (Milburn Stone, "Captive Wild Woman," "The Mad Ghoul," "The Frozen Ghost"), who fakes a car crash in front of Ruppert's home, becoming an unwelcome visitor out to steal the professor's unpublished papers. Ruppert's professional life is smeared by sensation seeking reporters, while his personal relationship with June is frowned upon by the local populace. The villains show their hand by murdering the professor's friend Albert Sears (Samuel S. Hinds, "The Raven," "The Strange Case of Doctor Rx," "Son of Dracula"), plus the doctor (Griff Barnett) bribed to insinuate King into the Ruppert household (all ends happily of course). The cast provides enough intrigue for Universal devotees, especially when the script fails to work up much excitement. Despite its inclusion as a SHOCK! title, its obscurity understandably continues, never broadcast on Pittsburgh's CHILLER THEATER like others such as "Secret of the Château," "The Man Who Cried Wolf," and "Mystery of the White Room." Brenda Joyce would end her brief screen career by 1949, as would long admired Patricia Morison, who displays her lengthy brunette tresses in one lingerie clad sequence, as she hopes to seduce her husband to sell out financially (she made just two final features after 1948).