Shadow of a Woman

...or maybe I should say it was a low priority rather than low budget noir, at least for Warner Brothers. WWII has just ended and Warner's A list stars have not yet returned from war, so the B list actors got a chance from 1942-1947 to take the lead.

This starts out as many a noir starts out - a lovely but lonely gal marries in haste to a dashing stranger - a doctor at that!. But beginning on their honeymoon it seems like someone is trying to kill her new husband and not being the least bit subtle about it. Also, there are strange people following the new couple around and taking pictures. Oh, and hubby forgot to mention he's been married before, has a son, and is in a nasty custody fight with his ex-wife.

The art design is cleverly done. The surroundings start out bright and cheery - on the beach at a seaside resort. As the new bride encounters layer after layer of suspense and uncertainty, the environment becomes as gloomy as her potential future as she ends up living in her husband's creaky old home with two sour looking servants that don't seem to like her any more than she trusts them.

I say that this seems like a low priority film to WB because there are some plot holes and goofs that just look silly in retrospect. The police consider the deceased an accidental death because he has fallen from a balcony although he carries clear marks and bruises from a beating? The police chief has the picture of the President on his wall, but it happens to be the President that died the year before (FDR)?? The new bride writes letters to a trusted friend about people she doesn't trust and then gives those letters to those untrusted people to mail?? The new husband has a distinct European accent but his sister does not??

The script is great overall, the atmosphere perfect, and the acting adequate, in particular I have to give kudos to Helmut Dantine as the creepy acting new husband. I'm sure in 1946, with memories of the war in Europe still fresh in everyone's minds, the rather Germanic accent of Helmut Dantine added just the right amount of suspicion and mystery to his character. Plus, note the subtle undercurrents of the coming cold war and red scares in the rising element of suspicion against anyone who is "different" - in this case Helmut Dantine's character who dares to question conventional medicine and even uses hypnotism on his patients - oh the horror! He MUST be a Communist! (Tongue in cheek here folks, this film is not about politics!)

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.

Interesting but flawed mystery set in post-war California. A newly married woman who grows afraid of her newly met husband is a good premise for a movie and one that Alfred Hitchcock would have probably done better with. There is a doubt in this film whether the husband is indeed guilty of something…although there is no doubt that he is suspicious. Suspicion itself if not enough to salvage this film.

The writing could have been better. Some of the plot is too hard to swallow. We are cheated out of seeing what brought the newlyweds together. What kind of doctor is the husband? He claims he is not an MD and others say he worked in the entertainment field.

The acting could have been better. The wife accepts too much aberrant behavior from her odd husband and the folks he attracts. By opening the film with a flashback, we already know that the wife survives to tell the tale – thus robbing the story of some needed tension.

Not a terrible movie, but one that could have been better and might be if it were remade.

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.

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!