Woman on the Run (Fidelity Pictures, Universal-International, 1950)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago (Saturday, January 25) I watched a surprisingly interesting film on Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” program on Turner Classic Movies: Woman on the Run (1950), an unusual production from Howard Welsch (who owned Fidelity Pictures, which two years later would produce Fritz Lang’s Rancho Notorious, essentially a film noir in Western drag like Jacques Tourneur’s Blood on the Moon and Anthony Mann’s Winchester ’73). His secret partner in producing this film and putting up the money to make it was its female star, Ann Sheridan, who’s quite good in the lead role of Eleanor Johnson, estranged wife of artist Frank Johnson (Ross Elliott). She and Welsch cut a deal with Universal-International to distribute and release it, and though the original story, “Man on the Run” by Sylvia Tate, had been written to emphasize the male lead, Sheridan insisted on switching the little around to emphasize her part even though it’s her on-screen husband, not her, who’s “on the run” for most of the movie. Woman on the Run opens with one of its best scenes: a dimly seen young man is cornered inside his car by an overweight Irish-cop stereotype who demands 75 percent of the money the man – obviously a police officer of some kind who took a bribe to look the other way at one of the city’s gang boss’s crimes. An assassin – obviously a hit man hired by the city’s crime bosses – shoots the corrupt cop and throws the body down a ridge (this is set in the hilly city of San Francisco, where plenty of ridges are available to throw bodies from; this scene reminded me of Miles Archer’s murder in the 1941 The Maltese Falcon). The scene is witnessed by Frank Johnson from his apartment window, and he responds by immediately fleeing the scene and going into hiding, so it really is the man, not the woman, on the run! The police investigating the murder, led by Inspector Ferris (Robert Keith, Brian Keith’s father), crash Frank’s and Eleanor’s apartment and make themselves monumentally obnoxious.

Eleanor makes her disinterest in finding her husband readily apparent by her monotone-like responses to the police officers’ questions and her lack of any apparent concern over his well-being. Frank, it turns out, was an aspiring artist but one who kept sabotaging his own career because he never thought he was “good enough,” and he kept moving around from city to city in search of fresh inspiration. Once, without telling him, Eleanor entered one of his paintings in a contest and it was good enough to win a $500 first prize, but Frank turned down the money and withdrew it from the competition. Ultimately Frank was so broke he had to take a job as a window dresser for a local department store, where he sculpts a mannequin bust in Eleanor’s likeness. (Three years earlier, Ann Sheridan had made a film called The Unfaithful in which a bust of her was also a major plot point.) There’s a neat scene in which the cops searching Frank’s and Eleanor’s apartment see the kitchen cupboards contain only dog food, and Eleanor explains that she and Frank eat all their meals out (which even in 1950 would have got expensive very quickly, especially for people living as much on the financial edge as the Johnsons). Their dog is named “Rembrandt,” a street rescue which Eleanor glumly says got that name because “it’s as close as we’ll ever come to owning one.” Eleanor has got tired of Frank’s lack of ambition but, when she visits his doctor, Dr. Hohler (Steven Geray), she learns that he has a congenital heart condition and needs regular doses of a medication to survive (though we never learn just what the all-important drug is). So it’s literally a matter of life or death for him that she find him. It’s also important to the police, who are frantically searching for him because the man he saw being murdered is the only witness they had against the city’s crime syndicate, and now Frank’s testimony against the gang and its hired killer is the only way they have to fight back and nail the gang.

Early on in the film Eleanor is accosted by Dan Legget (Dennis O’Keefe, making his Dick Powell-inspired transition from comedy and musical star to film noir actor), who tells her he’s a reporter for the San Francisco Graphic and his paper will pay them $5,000 for exclusive rights to his story if they can find him. About a third of the way through the film [spoiler alert!] we see Dan using a combination cigarette case and lighter we saw the unseen killer use in the opening scene, so we know he is the hit man assigned by the gang to eliminate the last witness that can put them away and he’s hooked up with Eleanor to help her find Frank so he can kill him. Along the way Eleanor sees various paintings Frank has made of her and given away to different people, including a bar owner who’s hung it over his bar, and becomes convinced that Frank loves her after all – and as she searches for him she realizes that she still loves him, too, and she gradually recommits to making the marriage work if and when she finds him alive. At one point Frank sends her a mysterious letter telling her he will be hiding in one of their former haunts, which forces her to dredge up memories of their old past dates to figure out where he could be. Unfortunately, the cops beat her to the letter and open it themselves. Later Eleanor and Dan realize that Frank has changed clothes since the cops know what he was wearing the last time he was seen alive, and they visit the clothes dealer who took his old coat and sold him a Navy pea coat (not an uncommon sight in a major port city like San Francisco) and matching cap. Ultimately they trace him to a beachfront amusement park – which filmmaking magic constructed from bits of San Francisco’s Playland and the Santa Monica Pier (I remember Playland from my childhood and the Santa Monica Pier from visits with a former partner in the late 1980’s who told me his parents had courted each other there).

Dan takes Eleanor on a roller-coaster ride despite her fear of roller coasters (one the real Ann Sheridan shared with her character; she got impatient and anxious as director Norman Foster called for take after take), and Foster and cinematographer Hal Mohr (a veteran who’d grown up in San Francisco, lived through the 1906 earthquake and fire as a child, and 21 years later had to reproduce it for the 1927 Warner Bros. film Old San Francisco) shoot it in a choppy, vertiginous style that seems to have wandered in from a film about 20 years later. (Mohr used a hand-held camera for some of these scenes and, rather than have an assistant shoot the hand-held scenes, did them himself.) The people running the roller coaster allow you to take a second ride for half price if you do so immediately after the first, and Dan uses that as a way to get Eleanor out of the way so he can go kill Frank, whom they’ve both spotted on the amusement-park grounds. There’s some effective suspense editing as Eleanor is whirled around on the roller coaster, helpless to stop Dan from killing Frank, and a rather gruesome sequence in which Dan and Frank struggle on the roller-coaster tracks as it passes by and one of them is decapitated. (It’s shot so gingerly as to get by the Production Code Administration – we certainly don’t see the severed head, as we would in a modern film – but we still get the point.) At first Eleanor and the cops both think Frank is the victim, but when the headless corpse is wearing a grey coat instead of Frank’s black one, they realize Frank got the better of Dan and is now out of immediate danger. The film ends with a close-up of the famous laughing female robot clown I remember from my days as a kid going to Playland before “The End” credit comes up (I miss “The End” credits) and we get a cast list.

Woman on the Run is both a commonly available film and one that’s become rare and obscure. Like a lot of films made during the transition between the studio system and the modern-day method of making movies through ad hoc production companies, it slipped out of copyright and so for years was available in public-domain prints. But most of those were in terrible condition, and the one known pristine copy was destroyed in the Universal Studios fire in Los Angeles in 2008. Then a negative turned up at the British Film Institute and was borrowed by UCLA, who struck new prints and did a major restoration job that (unlike such other UCLA restorations as the two-strip Technicolor version of the 1930 Paramount musical The Vagabond King with Jeanette MacDonald and Dennis King, or Anthony Mann’s great and little-known 1945 film noir The Great Flamarion) they’ve actually released to the general public. (I’ve often compared UCLA’s film archive to Fafner in Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, who turned himself into a dragon to guard the stolen treasure but never did anything with it.) The film turned out to be a real sleeper: Norman Foster had been a protégé of Orson Welles (he co-directed the 1942 film Journey Into Fear, based on an Eric Ambler novel, with Welles) and a good chunk of Wellesiana turns up in this movie. The Lady from Shanghai is particularly referenced, not only because the film is set in San Francisco and climaxes at its famous beachfront amusement park but because a key turn of the plot involves Asian-American performers Sam (Victor Sen Yung, best known as Charlie Chan’s Number Two Son in the films with Sidney Toler, who I didn’t realize until last night was actually born in San Francisco) and Suzie (Reiko Sato). They’ve formed a vaudeville team and are honing their act at a rooftop Chinese restaurant Eleanor and Frank Johnson frequented, only Suzie gets killed after Frank gives her a sketch of the man he saw commit the murder – and Dan kills her, then steals the sketch and tears it up. Eddie Muller presented Woman on the Run with an interesting co-host: African-American cinematographer turned director and writer Ernest Dickerson, who remembered the roller-coaster scene from his childhood. He walked in on his godmother while she was watching this movie on an old, dim black-and-white TV and vividly recalled the shot of Dan’s headless corpse floating in San Francisco Bay even though it wasn’t until years later that he realized what the movie was called, what it was about, or who else was in it.