Shadow of a Woman

A Film-Noir that is the type that uses psychological persuasion and medical methods to subtly terrorize and control victims with sheer will and a charming personality. There are no guns or physical attacks, it is all done with romance and power. It is one of the few, if any, films that dealt with naturalistic or holistic medicine and focus on diet and exercise to cure, that is used as a sure sign of villainy because of the dated belief of inherent quackery.

This has a creepy feel and an unnerving atmosphere of a small budget that can work to its advantage and an unknown cast that also adds to character maladies and a sense of losing one's footing.

A really effective story of forced proximity and family tie downs. A little sleeper that is only let down by a take no chance happy ending that is used in so many otherwise edgy films of the era, even in the Noir genre, that end it all with a period and more times than not would be more progressive with three dots...

Honeymooning after a whirlwind courtship, newlyweds Andrea King and Helmut Dantine cross the palm of a Gypsy fortune-teller with silver to have their futures read. The crone's face collapses like an ill-baked souffle when she gazes on Dantine's life-lines. `I haf nut'ing to tell you,' she stammers, then slithers off into the night.

Next day at the beach, a boulder the size of an asteroid rolls down a hill, almost squashing Dantine – the first of many such `accidents' which befall him. Her groom, King decides, has enemies. Back in San Francisco, King settles into his gloomy old Nob Hill mansion, inhabited too by his widowed sister and his crippled nephew, who welcome her coldly. Another surprise is a sickly young son by a previous marriage, of whom (and of which) King knew nothing.

Dantine, it turns out, is a quack doctor whose diet regiments cause his patients to drop like flies. His son, on the other hand, is heir to a fortune, and his regimen of nothing but orange juice begins to look to King like a plot to kill him....

Shadow of a Woman (meaningless title, by the way) is nothing more than a watchable programmer. Both principals were European-born, Dantine in Vienna (retaining a heavy accent), King in Paris (accent-free, though her English is wooden). The movie accepts and reproduces the conventions of the `jep' with few, if any, new twists: Dantine is a controlling husband who decides everything for his wife (a role he would reprise the next year in Whispering City), including how she feels – `You're tired;' `You're hysterical.' King, however, shows more spunk, and earlier on, than most of the swooning wives this kind of melodrama requires. If you can swallow its conventions, Shadow of a Woman is not a bad hour and a quarter – sort of a dress rehearsal for The House on Telegraph Hill five years later, a better movie that, especially in its setting, resembles it.

The beautiful and financially independent Brooke Gifford comes to regret her hasty marriage to quack "Doctor" Eric Ryder. Too late, she discovers their marriage is just a ruse to get custody of his son back and steal his inheritance. Why did she marry him in the first place? He's a divorced guy with a bizarre health food fixation (he's written a book called "Are You Eating Yourself Into the Grave?"). But it's the usual story. She was lonely; there weren't many marriageable men around during just-ended WWII. Slickly manipulative Eric, in the typical style of abusive men, swept her off her feet. Brooke's now older-and-wiser narration tells the story in the form of flashbacks.

This fascinating postwar film (over) dramatizes the way women were sucked back into domesticity after years of emotional and financial self-sufficiency during the war--and the pitfalls it held for them. Thank god Brooke still has some money and a house in San Bernardino--it gives her the means to fight back. It also enables her to have a terrific wardrobe--just because her husband's a potential murderer doesn't mean she can't look great. And you can be sure that cheapskate Eric wouldn't pop for all those trips to the hairdresser and manicurist, either.

Eric's health-food fixation is interesting, too. We think of healthy food as virtuous these days, but this film shows that in postwar America, too much of a concern with nutrition was considered quackery, if not worse (and in this case, it is worse). Eric, talks with a bogus European accent--"Have face in me, my dahling!" he tells Brooke. There's also a lot about women being "tired" in this film. Eric is always telling women they're "tired" so he can get them out of the way. How tired can these women actually be? They probably worked twelve hour shifts during the war and now they're supposed to be fragile?

The title, "Shadow of a Woman" is significant. The way women were driven from the public sphere into lives of forced domesticity after the war indeed led them to become shadows of their former selves.

Andrea King makes a mistake when she marries sinister alternative-medicine doctor Helmut Dantine. She realizes it pretty quickly, as we see in a story told from her point of view in flashback.

He seems like a truly loathsome person. It's hard, though, not to wonder if this movie was unwritten by the AMA. After all, not ALL people practicing alternative therapies, even back then are/were evil and/or quacks.

The most poignant part is the man's son, who is being held captive and being given a horrifyingly Spartan diet, ostensibly for his health.

That part will send chills up your spine. (If it knocks your spine out of quack, call a chiropractor.)

This is the kind of movie I saw on late-night TV as a kid that made me a devoted film noir fan. Its atmosphere is astonishingly eerie. It reminds me, in this regard, very much of the (better) "My Name Is Julia Ross."

The child, emaciated from a diet of nothing but orange juice. The charming but truly sinister new husband. The spooky home to which the bride comes.

It's that little boy that clinches it is a must!