A Woman’s Secret (1949)

A Woman’s Secret, released by RKO in 1949, was Nicholas Ray’s second film as a director. It’s been released in the Warner Archive series with Film Noir boldly blazoned on the disc cover. Whether it actually qualifies as a film noir is something we’ll get to in due course.

The movie opens with a shooting. Singing star Susan Caldwell (Gloria Grahame) finishes a radio spot and goes home where Marian Washburn (Maureen O’Hara) is waiting for her. Susan announces that she’s quitting her singing career. The two women quarrel. Susan runs upstairs in tears. Marian follows her into her room. A shot is heard. The housekeeper races upstairs to find that Susan has been shot. The police arrive and Marian tells them that she shot Susan.

Susan isn’t dead but the doctors say her survival is going to be touch and go.

The backstory slowly unfolds in a series of flashbacks. Marian had been a fine singer, headed for stardom, when she contracted a throat infection which ended her career. Shortly afterwards Marian and her accompanist (and apparently her fiancé in a very vague and informal way) Luke Jordan (Melvyn Douglas) discover starving (literally starving) would-be singer Susan Caldwell. Susan has a sensational voice and clearly has the potential to be the big star that Marian never became.

Susan becomes a very big star indeed, with Marian and Luke managing her career. Marian in particular acts as her mentor.

Which gives Marian a plausible motive for trying to kill her - if Susan quit singing Marian would lose her meal ticket.

It seems an open-and-shut case but Luke refuses to believe that Marian shot Susan. The detective in charge of the case, Inspector Fowler (Jay C. Flippen) has to admit that he’s not entirely happy with Marian’s confession. But if Marian didn’t shoot Susan who did?

The first thing that needs to be cleared up about this movie is that its claims to being film noir are very thin indeed. It does star Gloria Grahame who was certainly a bona fide film noir icon but that is not enough to qualify this as a film noir. It’s a mystery melodrama. Not that there’s anything wrong with mystery melodramas.

Gloria Grahame is of course superb. She always was. She’s so good (and at times so adorable) that you have to feel sorry for Maureen O’Hara. She’s very good but she’s inevitably overshadowed by Miss Grahame. Everybody in the cast is overshadowed by Gloria Grahame. She plays Susan as not quite a bad girl, but one who is impulsive and unpredictable and at times manipulative. Susan is just trouble, even though she’s not really aware of it at times. Mostly she’s young and immature and has no idea what she’s doing and she gets away with it because she’s beautiful and talented.

Melvyn Douglas is OK. Jay C. Flippen (one of those wonderful old character actors) and as Inspector Fowler and Mary Philips as his would-be amateur detective wife are fun.

I have to put on record the fact that I have mixed feelings about Nicholas Ray as a director. I like They Live By Night (which is more romantic melodrama than film noir) and Born To Be Bad and I love In a Lonely Place but Johnny Guitar and Rebel Without a Cause leave me cold and I thought Party Girl was embarrassingly bad. For me Nicholas Ray is a director who started promisingly but whose career went off the rails a bit. It’s undeniable however that he was very good at melodrama.

Herman J. Mankiewicz (yes, the guy who wrote Citizen Kane) wrote the screenplay and it has some problems. The solution to the mystery is blindingly obvious right from the start, even with some feeble attempts at misdirection. The script is, quite frankly, a bit of a mess.

The movie has other major problems. It gives the impression that either Nicholas Ray wasn’t sure what kind of movie he was making or maybe that studio interference caused the movie to be wildly inconsistent in tone. Maybe Ray just lost control. It starts as a slightly noirish melodrama but then it becomes almost a screwball comedy for a while before uneasily reverting to being a mystery.

The Warner Archive release offers a very good transfer without any extras.

A Woman’s Secret is a movie that seems to have been thrown together without any real thought as to what it was supposed to be. It just doesn’t quite work on any level. It actually might have worked better as an out-and-out comedy. Only worth seeing for Gloria Grahame’s extremely interesting and rather complex performance. For that it’s worth a rental.

Human Desire (1954)

I decided to follow up Jean Renoir’s La Bête humaine (The Human Beast) by watching Fritz Lang’s American remake, Human Desire, released by Columbia in 1954. In this case it really is a remake, since Lang based his production on Renoir’s film, and not on Zola’s novel. In fact there’s speculation that Lang didn’t even bother to read the novel!

The first surprise is that Lang opens his movie in exactly the same way. The opening of Renoir’s movie is a visual tour-de-force, an extended dialogue-free sequence involving  trains and railway tracks and setting up the relationship of the hero to the trains he loves so much. The images are magnificent, and for Lang to open his film in exactly the same way was a very brave thing to do. While it’s not quite as impressive, Lang gets away with it.

This opening also sets up a difference between the two versions of the story. The hero of Renoir’s version, Jacques Lantier, loves his locomotive dearly and there’s something almost organic and passionate and even perhaps slightly erotic in the relationship and in the images. Renoir’s railway is connected with life. Lang’s hero, Jeff, loves his job but the railway for Lang seems to symbolise something darker and more impersonal. It’s as if Lang’s railroad tracks don’t really lead anywhere, or they simply take us wherever fate wills.

The stories in the two films run mostly in parallel until the ending. Jeff (Glenn Ford) has returned from the Korean War to his job as a train engineer. He becomes involved with the wife (Gloria Grahame) of the assistant yard manager, and a witness to what appears to be a murder.

Lang’s task was much more difficult than Renoir’s, hampered as he was by the demands of the Hays Office and of a studio anxious to offend nobody and to provide a straightforward and if possible happy ending.  Given those constraints Lang does a reasonably good job.

The biggest change is in the personality of the hero. Jean Gabin as Lantier has a darkness within him, but Lang admitted he was forced to make Jeff a much more conventional hero. Glenn Ford is no Jean Gabin anyway, but he has little to work with. In some ways that perhaps suited Lang’s purpose. It makes Jeff a complete victim of fate.

It also puts more pressure on Gloria Grahame. Her character has to bear most of the burden of the moral murkiness of the movie. In fact she becomes the central character, and her relationship with her husband (played by Broderick Crawford as a pathetic but nasty drunk) becomes more central as well. Jeff becomes more of an innocent bystander caught up in events he never quite comprehends (rather like Ray Milland’s character in Lang’s earlier and underrated Ministry of Fear).

Fortunately Grahame is  equal to the task. Her performance is so good that the viewer, like Jeff, is never quite sure how much of what she’s telling him is the complete truth, an embellished version of the truth, or complete fabrication. The frustrating thing for us, and for him, is that there is certainly a considerable element of truth in her story.

The most unfortunate thing about Human Desire is that the plot does follow that of La Bête humaine rather closely so comparisons are inevitable, and it has to be said that Renoir’s is the better and more complex film.

Lang’s movie though is Lang’s movie, not Renoir’s, it reflects Lang’s concerns, and if you’re prepared to judge it on its own merits it’s a fine example of late American film noir. Highly recommended.