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...

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.)

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.

Okay slice of psychodrama and woman-in-danger flick. Still the script remains a rather uneasy mix of several elements. There're shadowy elements of noir, just emerging in '46, but mostly it's whether wife Brooke (King) can undo husband Eric's (Dantine) evil schemes and still survive. Can't say the plot's too original since Brooke marries Eric on short notice, not realizing his dark past. He poses as a doctor with unconventional methods, but just how "unconventional" is he. King looks good in 40's outfits, still I wish she (or director Santley) could have worked up more emotion. That would have heightened tension as the story winds down. But then the showdown is not what is ordinarily expected in this type movie. There's a good twist concerning the characters that I didn't see coming. So there are some surprises. Too bad that culminating fist-fight is none too plausible given Carl's (Alvin) gimpy leg. But dig that all- night diner that Joe (Erdman) presides over. It can compete with any of noir's many iconic diners.

All in all, the flick's an okay time-passer, but doesn't really pack the tension that's waiting there in the concept.