The Second Woman (Harry M. Popkin Productions, Cardinal Pictures, United Artists, 1950)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, January 3) was the Turner Classic Movies “Noir Alley” showing of a fascinating but not altogether great film from 1950, The Second Woman. It was produced by Harry M. Popkin and his brother Leo for United Artists release, and it was directed by James V. Kern from a script by Mort Briskin and Robert Smith. My husband Charles and I watched it together, and we’d already seen it in 2005 because we both remembered important details about the plot. The one I remembered is the scene in which the male lead, architect Jeffrey Cohalan (Robert Young), loses an important commission for a hospital because his plans were submitted without any drawings representing the interior. The one Charles remembered was the revelation late in the movie that in the opening scene, in which heroine Ellen Foster (Betsy Drake, then Mrs. Cary Grant, which suggested to “Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller that the Popkin brothers might have wanted Grant to play Jeff) breaks into a garage where Jeff is supposedly attempting suicide, that Jeff had drained the gas tanks in his car before he turned on the motor so he wouldn’t really die from carbon monoxide poisoning. Instead he’d become convinced someone close to him was trying to kill him and he wanted to fake his own death so whoever it was would stop trying. Muller’s intro mentioned that the film was largely a ripoff of Alfred Hitchcock’s (and David Selznick’s) Rebecca – an influence also copped to by imdb.com’s page (whose heading reads, “In flashback from a Rebecca-style beginning: Ellen Foster, visiting her aunt on the California coast, meets neighbor Jeff Cohalan and his ultramodern clifftop house”) – with admixtures of two other Hitchcock films, Suspicion and Spellbound. In fact the opening narration by Betsy Drake is so close to the opening of Rebecca, lamenting the destruction by fire of Jeff’s dream house on the Monterey cliffs (much of the film was shot on location in Monterey and Salinas with a crew left over from a previous Howard Welsch production, Woman on the Run, filmed largely in the San Francisco Bay Area), it’s a wonder Daphne Du Maurier, author of the Rebecca novel, didn’t sue for plagiarism.

There are various non-Hitchcock films also referenced here; the 1934 film The Black Cat had proved it was possible to do a sinister film in a new dark house, built to state-of-the-art design by a master architect who’s also a villain, just as well as you could in a crumbling old manse; and the year before The Second Woman Fritz Lang had made a film called Secret Beyond the Door (not one of his better movies) about a psycho architect living in a house of his own design and terrorizing the hapless heroine who’s married him. One thing Kern, Briskin, and Smith did right was have the heroine living with her aunt Amelia (Florence Bates) in an old Victorian home right next to Jeff’s new one, and the clash between their architectural styles (the Fosters’ home warm and cosy, Jeff’s cold and austere) becomes an important visual point in the film. Ellen meets Jeff when he’s visiting the Fosters and is simultaneously drawn to him as a potential romantic partner and skeptical of getting too close to him because he just seems too weird. In one of the many parties Amelia Foster hosts, Ellen is hit on by a ne’er-do-well “roo” type named Keith Ferris (John Sutton), who’s the office manager for Jeff’s patron and sponsor Ben Sheppard (Henry O’Neill). It looks like Keith is about to rape her when Jeff crashes the proceedings and saves her and her honor. Keith is also recently divorced from Dodo Ferris (Jean Rogers), who boasts that she’s just returned home from Reno, Nevada where she’s finally untied the knot with him. But the two still seem to be doing a lot of hanging out together even though they’re no longer legally a couple. For the last year Jeff has been haunted by the accidental death of his fiancée, Ben Sheppard’s daughter Vivian (played in flashbacks by Shirley Ballard), literally on the eve of their wedding. She was out driving in a car with a man, presumably Jeff, when they were involved in an accident with another car and she was killed. Ever since then Jeff has had a string of bad incidents he at first attributes to just bad luck – his prize matador rose bush is poisoned, his dog is also poisoned, his state-of-the-art home is burned down with gasoline carried in cans Jeff had purchased (the makers of this film had the catastrophic fire occur about three-fifths of the way through instead of saving it for the end à la Rebecca), his architectural plans go out without the 17 blueprint pages of interiors he’d designed and drawn, and at one point Ellen is nearly run down by a car and killed near the so-called “12-Mile Drive” where Vivian also had her fatal accident.

On the advice of Jeff’s doctor, Hartley (Morris Carnovsky), Ellen is led to believe that Jeff is paranoid and is doing all these terrible things to himself to atone for his sense of guilt over Vivian’s death. Ultimately both we and Jeff learn that the actual man who meant to murder him was [spoiler alert!] Ben Sheppard, who hated Jeff and wanted revenge against him for his daughter Vivian’s death. We also learn through a deus ex machina – another driver who witnessed the accident – and through Jeff’s own recollection of the truth that the man who was at the wheel when Vivian was killed was not Jeff but [second spoiler alert!] Keith Ferris, who was in love with Vivian (and she with him) but couldn’t marry her because Dodo wasn’t ready to divorce him yet. The revelation that Vivian was planning to run off with Keith on the eve of her marriage to Jeff was yet one more plot point of this movie ripped off from Rebecca – the revelation that the late heroine was a “bad” woman after all (Du Maurier and Hitchcock’s writers, Robert E. Sherwood and Joan Harrison, were considerably more circumspect as to just what sorts of evil Rebecca was doing, though they certainly involved extra-relational sexual activities) – though the makers of The Second Woman fell into a trap Selznick had talked Hitchcock out of: actually showing the “bad” woman as an on-screen character. (She’s much more chilling as an unseen presence.) The Second Woman was an interesting but also rather unsatisfying film, despite an odd technique James M. Kern used to the max, which Muller pointed out in his intro: he’d let the camera linger on the various actors after a scene’s dialogue had concluded, and each time the actor would be giving the camera a sinister glance implying that they were up to no good whether they were or not. Muller also noted that it was odd that John Sutton didn’t play the principal villain, as he did in most of his movies (he had the pencil-thin “roo” moustache that, except on Ronald Colman, generally denoted that the character was at least unscrupulous and at worst downright evil), but at least he played a villain if not the main one. And I was a bit startled when Kern, Briskin, and Smith left Ben Sheppard alive at the end; from the way he was waving a gun around during the final confrontation I was thinking they’d have Ben shoot himself à la Spellbound, but that was one Hitchcock ripoff from which they drew back.