Woman in Hiding (Universal-International, 1950)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, January 27) I watched the “Noir Alley” presentation on Turner Classic Movies of a film I’d only barely heard of: Woman in Hiding, made in 1950 by Universal-International and directed by Michael Gordon. It began life as a Saturday Evening Post serial called “Fugitive from Terror” by James Webb; the “adaptation” was made by Roy Huggins, most famous for creating the mega-hit TV series The Fugitive in 1962, though Oscar Saul wrote the actual screenplay. What was most striking about it was how strongly it anticipated the ground-breaking 1991 film Sleeping with the Enemy: both movies are about women who escape abusive marriages by pretending to have died in accidents. In Woman in Hiding the woman in hiding is Deborah Chandler Clark (Ida Lupino), who just after her wedding to Selden Clark IV (Stephen McNally, in a chilling villain performance rivaling his work in the Universal-International horror film The Black Castle two years later) got in her big convertible car and tried to run away from him. The opening scene shows Deborah at the wheel frantically speeding along a mountain road and ultimately losing control and taking a header off a bridge. Then we hear Deborah’s voice in the soundtrack and for a moment we think this is going to be one of those movies narrated from beyond the grave, like the masterpiece Sunset Boulevard (1950) or the messterpiece Scared to Death (1947). No: actually Deborah survived the crash (we’re not sure how, but perhaps she bailed from the car before it went over the bridge), and we next get a flashback sequence that establishes that Deborah’s father John Chandler (John Litel) owned the mill in Clarksville that provided the town’s only economic driver until he suddenly died in a supposed “accident” and Deborah was next in line to take over. Only it turned out that Selden Clark IV, whose great-grandfather was a Confederate general in the Civil War (the film starts out in North Carolina and then shifts to Tennessee) who led his troops to certain slaughter in a nearby battle against a Union army that far outnumbered his forces and were also dug in. (Not many people realize that Ulysses S. Grant actually invented trench warfare; he knew he could fight a war of attrition because the Union had three times as many men of military age as the Confederacy, though a lot of his fabled drinking was done to assuage his guilt over the number of men he was sending to their deaths. When the armies of both sides tried the same tactic during World War I the result was a bloody stalemate that lasted four years), murdered John Chandler and then intimidated Deborah into marrying him as part of his long-term plan to grab control of the mill.

Deborah realizes this when the couple show up at a remote cabin in the Smoky Mountains (which I’ve otherwise heard of only as the birthplace of Dolly Parton) for their wedding night – and another woman is already there. She’s Selden’s former girlfriend Patricia Monahan (Peggy Dow, turning in a marvelous acid-etched performance along the lines of Ann Savage’s in Detour: a hard-bitten woman who’s decided that conventional morality is a luxury she cannot afford; too bad that just two years after making this film she married an oil multimillionaire from Oklahoma and retired, though the marriage lasted 60 years). Patricia doesn’t want to let go of Selden but reluctantly agrees to the inevitable, but only after he gives her a back-handed slap with such force he literally knocks her down. (This was the scene that started me thinking of Sleeping with the Enemy, though in the more recent film it was the abused wife who was the recipient of the evil husband’s back-handed slap.) This shocks Deborah into the realization that she’s just married a psychopath who will stop at nothing to kill her, and she tries to get away – only she realizes that Selden has done a surprisingly thorough job of sabotaging her car. Not only has he cut the brake lines, he’s disconnected the hand brake as well and he’s disabled the inside driver’s-side door handle so she can’t bail out and escape. Deborah takes whatever money she has on her and buys a bus ticket, trying to trace down Patricia because she figures she needs a witness to attest to the police about what an evil and unscrupulous man her husband is. She goes to the address she has for Patricia, but her landlady tells Deborah that Patricia is out of town and not expected back for three weeks. Meanwhile, Selden, upset that he can’t get full control of the mill until Deborah is definitively established as either alive or dead, offers a reward for her – and her picture gets published in the newspapers and magazines. Fearful of being recognized, she abruptly quits her job as a waitress and stops in a beauty salon to have her hair dyed blonde, then gets on a bus again.

In the bus station she’s recognized by Keith Ramsey (Howard Duff), who decides to turn her in to Selden for the $5,000 reward so he can relocate to California and pursue a career as a boatbuilder. (I wonder if this plot twist was inspired by the 1949 film Holiday Affair, a romantic drama rather than a film noir but with noir legend Robert Mitchum as a similarly impoverished young drifter and World War II veteran with an ambition to build boats.) They end up in the middle of a hotel hosting a sales convention for the Make Rite company – reminding me of a film my husband Charles and I had just watched, the 1949 D.O.A., which also had a key sequence taking place at a hotel convention. But this one is even wilder than the one in D.O.A., complete with randy male salespeople chasing down anyone who’s alive, human and female. Selden catches up to Deborah and runs into her in a stairwell, hoping to kill her the way he did her dad, but they’re interrupted by a conventioneer who tells him to lay off a woman who’s clearly uninterested in him because there are plenty of females there who would trick with him. Later Keith brings Deborah, who in her flight has been calling herself “Ann Carter,” to a train – only Selden is there and accepts delivery of his runaway bride. But something he says makes Keith aware that the stories Deborah told him about Selden’s ruthlessness are true, and he realizes he’s turned over a woman he’s come to care about to her monster of a husband. Still later Deborah finally finds Patricia Monahan – only she, too, double-crosses her because she and Selden have made up and got back together, and Patricia is as eager as Selden to get Deborah out of the way so Selden can inherit the mill. The climax takes place inside the mill, where Selden has trapped Deborah and turned on the mill’s machinery so no one can hear her cries for help; Keith arrives in a cab and the two men have a fight to the finish, with Patricia also there. Ultimately both Selden and Patricia fall to their deaths off the mill stairs, and Deborah seemingly unloads the mill on her dad’s attorney, Lucius Maury (Taylor Holmes), since the last shot shows her and Keith, newly married after Selden’s death, driving a new car (a black Ford hardtop) to California and settling there.

Eddie Muller said in his intro that Ida Lupino didn’t really want to make Woman in Hiding. At the time she’d taken up directing as part of a company she and her then-husband, producer Collier Young, had formed called The Filmakers [sic]; they wanted to make socially conscious films and their first, Not Wanted, was a drama about unwed motherhood. Elmer Clifton was supposed to be the director, but he had a heart attack during the first week of shooting and Lupino took over. Lupino caught the directorial bug and looked for further projects that would keep her behind the cameras, but she realized she’d still have to make a living as an actress between directorial gigs. So she took Woman in Hiding just for the money, and Universal-International promised her two old friends from Warner Bros., Bruce Bennett as the evil husband and Ronald Reagan as the man who rescues her. Only Reagan, in the throes of his political changeover from self-described “hemophiliac liberal” to dyed-in-the-wool Right-winger, crashed Lupino’s party and shocked her progressive friends by denouncing the Screen Writers’ Guild as full of Communists. Then he injured himself in a softball game and was out of commission, forcing the role to be recast. The replacement, Howard Duff, was an actor Lupino had once insulted to his face, but he took the job anyway and once they started working together they began an affair even though Lupino was still married to Collier Young. Eventually Lupino divorced Young and married Duff – though it was a troubled marriage and Lupino responded by upping her alcohol consumption. But she and Young remained business partners in The Filmakers, and when Don Siegel directed the movie Private Hell 36 (the title referred to a trailer where Lupino’s character and Steve Cochran, playing a cop Lupino’s character had corrupted, shacked up) for The Filmakers in 1954 he said he had a hard time with the “bedroom politics” of a film starring a woman with her ex as producer and her current husband as co-star. (Duff played the honest cop who was Cochran’s partner.) Later in the 1950’s Duff and Lupino co-starred in a TV situation comedy called Mr. Adams and Eve – apparently the mega-success of I Love Lucy had sparked a trend for real-life couples doing sitcoms on TV – but it only lasted two seasons.

Woman in Hiding is one of those movies that starts at 11 and works up to 20 or even 25, but the sheer overwroughtness of it is part of the fun. Michael Gordon is the director of record, but the film is so uneven I suspect Lupino herself ghost-directed a lot of it, particularly the scenes that most look like film noir. This certainly does not look like the work of a director whose most famous credit was the first Doris Day-Rock Hudson film, Pillow Talk. Is Woman in Hiding really a film noir? I would say basically no – it lacks the moral ambiguity, though Peggy Dow’s character is a classic femme fatale – but a lot of it looks noir, and whatever its merits as a noir it is an exciting, nail-biting thriller, and whether Lupino directed any of it or not, certainly her performance is at least as good, and probably better, than Julia Roberts’s in the quasi-remake Sleeping with the Enemy from four decades later!