Mulher Sem Alma

So, how many victims can the great Marie Windsor (Carolyn) double-cross in less than an hour. Let's see, I've got to four and still counting. Actually, I'll watch anything with the big-eyed seductress. She always looks like she's enjoying some delicious inner joke even as her sly characters aim to corrupt, especially the poor two-timed Elisha Cook in that great heist flick The Killing (1956). Here she gets what amounts to a showcase as the victims pile up. In my little book, Windsor deserves a lifetime Oscar as a true one-of-a-kind.

The narrative starts out as a series of romantic entanglements, but shifts half-way through into a murder mystery. The mystery doesn't play that well since the focus is too spread out among the suspects. To me, it's the cast of B-movie familiars that carries the interest. Add up the delicious Windsor, a straight-up Archer, an officious Louis Jean Heydt, along with that grinning gnome Percy Helton, and the lordly Ankrum, and you've got characters worth watching. Then too, there's a revealing display of street scenes LA, circa 1955, along with a procession of tight female sweaters trailing behind the bosomy Marilyn Monroe.

All in all, it's a good little time-passer from Republic with what amounts to a central surprise to give it note. (Hard to believe, but looks like {IMDB} Windsor, born in Salt Lake City, was a lifetime Mormon! Talk about appearances vs. reality.)

Windsor plays a conniving, unfaithful wife whose fed up husband wants to marry a "nice" girl and is willing to make her a fair offer in exchange for a divorce. She makes an exorbitant demand and ups the price by 100 grand after he responds by throwing a drink in her face. This is followed by her shocked father-in-law's remark "no matter how you look at it, that woman is a witch!" To which his son replies "no matter how you spell it either." A good example of some of the clever (not to mention funny) pseudo-profanity and "no-no" innuendo script writers had to develop back then.

As usual, Windsor plays her part to the hilt and makes a very credible villain. Unfortunately, the script writers went overboard with her character, almost making her a caricature of herself. They exaggerate her "W" or "B"ness to such a degree that it becomes unrealistic and even comical. What self-respecting cold, calculating gold-digger would publicly commit adultery with her secretary's fiancée before she was done squeezing her husband? Windsor herself seems to display an inner grin even with her nastiest facial expressions. She no doubt realized how ridiculous some of the script was. In the movie, she owns and lives in an art gallery. Since the real Marie Windsor was a multi-talented individual who achieved some success as a painter and sculptress, I wonder if this is simply coincidental.

I guess one purpose served by making her such a larger than life meanie is to make all the suspects seem equally likely to have killed her.

A mix of true "noir" and standard "whodunit" hurt by overdone melodramatics, yet still worth seeing.

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.

Marie Windsor gives an impressive performance as an egocentric man-eater ;it seems that she takes her pleasure by breaking her fellow men 's lives.After thirty minutes, four men and two women have a reason to do away with her , that beats everything!

That's why the second part , without her , seems pale by comparison ; it's a whodunit , with the usual suspects ,the false alibis , the wrong man who confesses something he's not done.

Recalling Joan Crawford , Miss Windsor's going to blow your mind.

Remember how the Perry Mason show always started with a drama about a bunch of unfamiliar characters, one of whom went out of his or her way to be nasty to all the others, leaving a nice collection of suspects for the viewer to sort through after he or she was murdered? The beginning of this film, made two years before the Mason show debuted, will bring back memories of those episodes. There's no shrewd defense attorney or even a courtroom scene but, again Mason-like, it was filmed in sunny 1950's L. A. with slick professionalism and an almost anonymous cast, with the exception of renowned noir femme fatale Marie Windsor.

As usual in such dramas, the cops set their sights on the wrong suspect. In this case, however, the suspects themselves work out who's the guilty party.

In brief, a straightforward well-made little whodunit that moves along briskly and should keep you engaged for eighty minutes or so.