Cornell Woolrich’s premise that happiness is always just beyond reach grabs hold of noir thrillers Dark City, Beware, My Lovely, and No Man of Her Own.
All the films in Kino Lorber’s three-disc box Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema XIX are highly visual and suspenseful treats. We’re going to focus on the often overlooked gem, Mitchell Leisen’s fascinating and fabulous No Man of Her Own (1950), inspired by Cornell Woolrich’s noir premise that happiness is always just beyond reach. First, let’s acknowledge the other two films: William Dieterle’s Dark City (1950) and Harry Horner’s Beware, My Lovely (1952).
PopMatters discusses Dark City in “Farther Than You Think: Mapping the Noir Terrain” (2015), and that piece covers the film with such intelligence and style that we needn’t reinvent the wheel. That was an Olive Films disc, which is now outclassed by Kino Lorber’s 2022 high-definition mastering from a 4K scan. You also get a commentary track by noir historian Alan K. Rode.
Beware, My Lovely Digs into the Danger within Domestic Coziness
Beware, My Lovely showcases two great names in noir, Ida Lupino and Robert Ryan. Lupino plays a rich widow who hires a handyman (Ryan), an initially charming figure whom the viewer understands as bonkers. More technically, he’s a paranoiac subject to amnesiac fits of violence that have something to do with his insecurities as a he-man. Mel Dinelli’s script is based on his play, simply called The Man to underline that point. In other words, Ryan’s character can be seen as a variant on his Oscar-nominated role in a more significant noir, Richard Brooks’ Crossfire (1947), although different dynamics were at play there, and also a variant of his dangerous husband in Max Ophuls’ Caught (1949).
Then, too, Harry Horner‘s Beware, My Lovely can be read from a midcentury feminist view of the home, that bastion of supposed security, revealing itself a trap even for the woman who owns it. In that sense, the film links again to Caught and Ophuls’ magnificent The Reckless Moment (1949). From this angle, Lupino’s widow is frustratingly helpless, especially since the audience knows more than she does. That’s par for the course in this era’s plots about women in jeopardy.
Having Beware, My Lovely take place at Christmas underlines the air of danger within domestic coziness. While this choice allows for delicious moments like Ryan’s distorted reflection in a round ornament on the tree, we must admit that this, too, recalls a more important noir, Nicholas Ray’s brilliant They Live By Night (1948).
Beware, My Lovely is less a significant noir than a straight-up suspense thriller of the much-used, slow-burning trope of “Goodness me, I’ve let a psycho into my house, apartment, car, boat, bed, ski-lift, whatever.” In that regard, it signals many later films, including Lupino’s The Hitch-Hiker, which makes men the victims of another man. The trope keeps returning to feed our insecurities because it works, especially in the hands of pros like Ryan and Lupino. This Blu-ray from Kino Lorber offers a commentary by film scholar Jason A. Ney.
It’s time for the jewel in the box.
Cornell Woolrich’s Noir Style Shadows No Man of Her Own
I have a theory that one reason Mitchell Leisen‘s No Man of Her Own has often been overlooked is because it’s got the wrong title. For reasons known only to studio wisdom, Paramount recycled the name of Wesley Ruggles’ 1932 romance starring Clark Gable and Carole Lombard. If you go looking for something called “No Man of Her Own”, that’s the film that often comes up and has always been easier to find. You might then wrongly assume that the 1950 film is a remake. However, Leisen’s woman’s noir is based on a 1948 novel by Cornell Woolrich, under his William Irish pseudonym, called I Married a Dead Man. Who wouldn’t prefer that title?
After the opening credits of No Man of Her Own, Hugo Friedhofer’s romantic, string-laden yet nervous and restless score drops momentarily into the diegetic tinkling of an ice cream truck that trundles on a slow diagonal up a tree-lined street. As the truck passes out of frame to the left, the camera pans lazily across more trees to a sidewalk and large houses.
Two women amble away from us down the sidewalk without a care in the world. Farther off is a man watering his lawn with a hose, as in the famous opening paragraphs of James Agee’s poem Knoxville: Summer of 1915 (1938). It’s idyllic small-town imagery.
Barbara Stanwyck‘s wistful voiceover says, “The summer nights are pleasant in Caulfield. They smell of heliotrope and jasmine, honeysuckle and clover. The breeze that stirs the curtains is soft and gentle. There’s the hush, the stillness of perfect peace and security. Oh yes, the summer nights are pleasant in Caulfield, but not for us, not for us.” Taken from the novel’s opening, this prose begins as James Agee lyricism and morphs into Cornell Woolrich’s sad nostalgia for the promise always out of reach.
This emotional and stylistic vein continues as the camera approaches a house’s exterior, passes into the foyer with its staircase, and pans in a slow curve to the left, initially presenting decorative emptiness as though the house is as deserted as the Marie Celeste. We finally see a man sitting on a chair by a fireplace. He’s holding Thomas Wolfe’s ironically titled Look Homeward, Angel (1929). However, he’s staring above it, still like a statue, a visual echo of the blind stone carving on the fireplace corbel behind him. When we finally get to see Stanwyck sitting on the other side of the fireplace, holding what looks like a dead baby (don’t worry, he’s not dead) like a Madonna della Pietà, she’s echoed by a parallel stone face.
Her narration continues, “The house we live in is so pleasant. The lawn always seems freshly watered, the beds of flowers so neat. The dazzling whiteness of the porch supports, the satin finish of the rich old floors, the smell of wax. This is a home, warm and friendly as a home should be. But not for us, not for us. I love him and he loves me. I know he does. And yet I know just as surely that someday he’ll pack his things and leave [image of him staring over the book] though he won’t want to. But even if he doesn’t leave [now we see Stanwyck] I know it will be I who will walk out and never come back.”
Thus, the film giveth and taketh away. We’re presented with peace and security in uncertainty and despair. The rest of the film will present the flashback by Stanwyck’s character, and it’s important to realize that No Man of Her Own positions its story as a flashback from this moment of dreadful anticipation as a phone call signals the police on their way. The narrative might have been told from a later standpoint, after everything has been resolved and our heroine looks back with equanimity and serenity, but that wouldn’t be Cornell Woolrich. We must be on edge.
Like Leonard Kastle’s later, darker The Honeymoon Killers (1970), No Man of Her Own pegs the stages of its plot’s passion to a succession of American holidays: the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, and finally Valentine’s Day. On the Fourth of July, we find a shell-shocked Helen (Stanwyck) sitting in a phone booth swathed in the exquisite chiaroscuro lighting of cinematographer Daniel L. Fapp, one of the film’s MVPs. Nobody has answered her call, and Helen dutifully retrieves the nickel because she can’t waste it.
In desperation, she trudges up the winding stairs to a shabby Manhattan apartment. She knocks on the door and begins screaming and crying, begging Steve inside not to “do this to me.” An angry neighbor (Esther Howard of Robert Wise’s 1947 film Born to Kill) barks at her to show consideration. Inside, an unnamed woman listed in the credits as Blonde (Carole Mathews) tells Steve Morley (Lyle Bettger) that “she’s here again”. Steve puts a train ticket to San Francisco and five dollars into an envelope and silently slips it under the door. The Blonde, impassively standing by, calmly warns him in a bit of foreshadowing that he’d better never try to brush her off that way. He smirks. He spends all his screen time smirking.
In a bravura shot and performance, Helen unfolds the ticket, lets the money drop to the floor, displays a wave of nuanced emotions flowing over her face, slouches in defeat, picks up the suitcase she lugged up the stairs, and reverses her steps around and downward. The camera pans down to the money lying on the carpet as a sign of her moral triumph amid despair.
We realize she’s been seduced and abandoned, according to the conventions of the time, and that her loose dress indicates pregnancy out of wedlock, but she won’t take the money and confirm herself as, well, let’s say, a cheap floozy. Stanwyck, Leisen, and Fapp collaborate on a powerful, rich shot that tells us much about the film’s era.
By the way, the commentaries point out that the Blonde’s hairstyle strikingly resembles that of Stanwyck’s character in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944). It’s as though Steve has traded in Helen for a newer model, or an older model, as the case may be. Again, this is part of foreshadowing.
Cut to the train, and No Man of Her Own is a film with many trains, many envelopes and many mirrors and reflections; it even lifts a train idea from Double Indemnity. As Helen sits dejected at the end of the aisle, two important characters are introduced by the interaction of their shoes, a detail that may remind viewers of how characters are introduced by their footwear in Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951).
Helen’s strangers on a train will be equally fateful for her. They are a vivacious couple, Hugh (Richard Denning) and Patrice Harkness (Phyllis Thaxter), and Patrice noticed Helen because she’s equally pregnant. This couple is almost surreally nice, thoughtful, and generous. Suddenly, a shocking thing occurs, as conveyed with brilliantly stylized disorientation, and then Helen’s subjective POV shots as she gazes foggily up at doctors and hospital ceilings.
Helen masquerades as Patrice to Hugh’s family for the rest of No Man of Her Own. This is how she meets Hugh’s brother Bill (John Lund), the stocky mustached fellow who wasn’t reading his Wolfe back at the film’s beginning. At every point of deception and danger, for of course Steve must show up again, the film carefully conveys Helen’s motivations, which come down to providing a future for her baby and not wishing to hurt the fragile constitutions of Hugh’s aged parents (Jane Cowl, Henry O’Neill).
Just as when Helen left the five dollars on the floor, the script and Stanwyck’s performance underline her essential decency and goodness, showing why these qualities are a source of torture. Someone without a conscience would be happy as a clam, and that’s why Steve’s around for contrast. Viewers will be reminded of Stanwyck’s iconic role as the self-sacrificing single mom in King Vidor’s Stella Dallas (1937), in which Stella suffers so nobly and performs so many miracles that she merits canonization.
Helen’s finally a little less saintly because circumstances drive her nearly mad. These circumstances ripple outward to demonstrate that all kinds of good people can become infected with dark choices, but always with this crucial proviso: everyone is motivated by selfless desires to protect their loved ones. Steve is the sole selfish bastard on the horizon, with the Blonde as his accessory.
The Cornell Woolrich Paradox
One of Cornell Woolrich’s paradoxes is that, in his novels at least, he usually (but not always) saves his protagonists after putting them through the wringer. They’re saved in the same way they’re endangered, by capricious fate and wild coincidence, plus a little shoe leather and help from friends. Woolrich is a master of paranoia, claustrophobia, and self-loathing, which No Man of Her Own has in spades, and it has another paradoxical quality that can make us ask the pointless question: Is it really noir?
True, Woolrich is noir almost by definition, and certain shots and elements in No Man of Her Own wear their noir credentials on their lapels or their ring fingers. On the other hand, Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward omitted the film from their landmark Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style, published by Overlook Press in 1979, and we can guess why.
Noir is a slippery, mercurial genre defined more by tone than anything else, and one of its qualities is a dark vision of the world as populated by cynicism, corruption, greed, and crime. Well, Steve embodies those elements, but otherwise we’re presented with a magical world in which everyone goes beyond the merely good into fabulous levels of decency, generosity, kindness, happiness, and thoughtful consideration. Everybody loves everybody, just like Hollywood’s typical mythology of small-town America, whether in the Andy Hardy movies or 1950s family sitcoms.
In this sense, No Man of Her Own reminds me of the screenplays of Isobel Lennart, in which conflicts always arise from characters who care too much about each other’s feelings. She came closer than anyone in Hollywood to writing scripts almost devoid of antagonists, but of course, you can’t have a Woolrich story like that, or a noir like that.
Cornell Woolrich’s paranoia ensures that even though Helen has dropped into this paradise of nice people, she’s afraid to enjoy it, feels she doesn’t deserve it, and assumes she’ll be expelled or exile herself from it. Sadly, this seems to reflect the author’s worldview, which kept him from enjoying the success he earned. As compensation, he gifted us with bleak visions that dominate his tone more than any happy endings and have been adapted into many incarnations. Something in us responds to his corrosion.
Just as the difference between a happy ending or a sad one depends on where you stop, one key to Cornell Woolrich’s noir vision is where he chooses to situate his characters’ perspective. For Helen, as we’ve noted, we’re grounded in her fearful dread, which turns her prosperous surroundings into sackcloth and ashes (“but not for us, not for us”), as opposed to telling the story from the grounding of, for example, “Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again” in Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938). Du Maurier is a good comparison because her protagonists are just as neurotic and claustrophobic in their current situations, and because Leisen directed a film of her Frenchman’s Creek (1944).
The screenplay for No Man of Her Own belongs to two notable women authors. Sally Benson is known for warm-hearted stories in Junior Miss (1941) and Meet Me in St. Louis (1942), both filmed successfully. Vincente Minnelli’s Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) is also notable for its neurotic melancholy and escapist desires, reflecting the uncertain war years. Catherine Turney wrote for major women stars, such as Stanwyck, Bette Davis, and Joan Crawford. She adapted her novel of ghostly possession, The Other One, into Charles Marquis Warren’s film Back from the Dead (1957).
Leisen was an architect and designer who became a stylish director of many films. Most are light romps, usually vehicles for women, which may partly explain why he hasn’t been taken as seriously as he deserves. No Man of Her Own is probably his only noir, though I’d like to track down Bedevilled (1955), a Parisian tale advertised with the tagline “He fell in love with a beautiful killer!”
His television work includes three episodes in the first season of The Twilight Zone (1959-60), plus Thriller (1960), General Electric Theater (1955-60), and The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. (1966-67). That’s range, and that’s not all. He did at least six half-hours of Markham (1959), a detective show with Ray Milland that seems to have sought the most stylish directors (Robert Florey, Gerd Oswald, Bretaigne Windust, Don Weis, Douglas Heyes) and writers (Jonathan Latimer, Henry Slesar, Stirling Silliphant, John Kneubuhl); it cries out for exhumation. In The American Vein (1979), Christopher Wicking and Tise Vahimagi opine, “When somebody, at last, talks a Film Theatre into a Leisen retrospective, maybe it will include the best examples of the final phase of his consistently creative career.”
Andrew Sarris has dubbed Leisen “lightly likeable”. David Thomson’s The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Fourth Edition (2003) calls him “surely a neglected figure, and a minor master” and avers that when Swing High, Swing Low “turns somber it is a love story noir in 1937!” He calls No Man of Her Own a “richer noir than many more famous works”. He notes that Leisen shows warmth and generosity for his characters, supports his actors in this, and surrounds them with style.
Olive Films released a DVD of No Man of Her Own in 2012. Kino Lorber’s new Blu-ray rises to the occasion with a 2020 HD master scanned from 4K. One commentary is by historian Imogen Sara Smith, who emphasizes the careers of Leisen and Stanwyck, and a second track is by writers Julie Kirgo and Peter Hankoff, who are more like enthusiastic fans.