No Man of Her Own (Mitchell Leisen Productions, Paramount, 1950)

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

On Wednesday, March 19, my husband Charles and I watched an intriguing if rather mixed film on Turner Classic Movies, which they showed as part of their “Star of the Month” tribute to Barbara Stanwyck: No Man of Her Own (1950), a film noir – or at least a film gris, my joking term for a movie that attempts to be noir but falls short either thematically or visually. No Man of Her Own was based on a 1948 novel called I Married a Dead Man – a much better title – by echt noir writer Cornell Woolrich. Many quite good noirs were made from Woolrich’s stories, either under his own name or his pseudonym “William Irish,” including Phantom Lady (1944), The Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948), Fear in the Night (1947) and its remake Nightmare (1956), and by far the best known film of a Woolrich story, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954). Woolrich’s great weakness as a writer was plot points that make virtually no sense; for example, Fear in the Night asked us to believe that a person could be hypnotized into literally committing a murder but believing he had only dreamed the crime. I looked up I Married a Dead Man on Wikipedia (I’ve never read the book), and it was about a young woman named Helen Georgesson who has an affair with a scoundrel. Georgesson gets pregnant, and when she’s eight months along the baby’s father gives her a train ticket from New York to San Francisco and a $5 bill. On the train she encounters a young newlywed couple named Hugh and Patrice Hazzard, only the train crashes and the Hazzards are both killed. Since Helen was trying on Patrice’s wedding ring at the time of the crash, she’s mistaken for Patrice and is taken in by the Hazzard family. She goes along with it because the Hazzards are well-to-do and can give her newborn son (in the book she gives birth in the wreckage of the train; in the film she delivers in a hospital after she’s taken there and put in a high-class ward the rich family have paid for) a good and financially secure life. All goes well for her until one day she receives a mysterious unsigned letter asking one question: “Who are you?”

Paramount bought the film rights to I Married a Dead Man and gave the task of adapting it to two writers, Sally Benson and Catherine Turney, neither of whom were noir specialists but both of whom were associated with classic noirs. Benson’s best-known film was Meet Me in St. Louis, based on 5135 Kensington, her memoir of her childhood in St. Louis, though she’d also worked on Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943) because Hitchcock felt her small-town background would be helpful for that film. Turney worked on the script for Mildred Pierce (1945), though Mildred Pierce was a hybrid – half romantic melodrama and half film noir – and Turney worked on the romantic-melodrama parts while Ranald MacDougall wrote the noir portions and got sole credit. Paramount’s choice of a director was also problematic: Mitchell Leisen, a more or less openly Gay man who’d started out as an assistant to Cecil B. DeMille and by the early 1930’s had worked his way up to directing himself. Leisen had directed the spectacular musical Murder at the Vanities (1934) but that film had been far less entertaining than it could have been because Leisen hated Busby Berkeley’s lavish production numbers and insisted that the numbers in Murder at the Vanities be shot from the vantage point of a good seat in a theatre. Leisen’s best films were ones in which Preston Sturges, Norman Krasna or Billy Wilder were his writers, and Sturges and Wilder both got so exasperated at the changes Leisen made in their scripts they sought out and won directorial jobs themselves. Leisen had worked with Stanwyck before on Remember the Night (1940), a marvelous screwball comedy with Stanwyck as a shoplifter and Fred MacMurray as the prosecutor who ultimately falls in love with her, but Sturges wrote the script for that one and was disappointed that Leisen didn’t think MacMurray could handle the rapid-fire dialogue exchanges Sturges had written for him and Stanwyck.

For No Man of Her Own – a title Paramount lifted from a 1932 romantic comedy they’d made with Clark Gable and Carole Lombard (their only film together, four years before they became a couple for real) with nothing in common plot-wise with this one – Benson and Turney changed the characters’ names to “Helen Ferguson” (Barbara Stanwyck) and “Hugh and Patrice Harkness” (Richard Denning and Phyllis Thaxter). Hugh’s parents were played by Henry O’Neill and Jane Cowl; Cowl had been a major stage star in the early 20th century and was in the middle of a late-in-life comeback in films that lasted until her role in Bette Davis’s first post-Warner Bros. feature, Payment on Demand (1951), made before but released after All About Eve. The first half of the film closely follows Woolrich’s tale but the second half veers into some pretty bizarre melodramatic complications. In the movie the document that lets Helen Ferguson, a.k.a. Patrice Harkness, know that someone is on to her is a telegram, not a letter, and it contains three questions instead of just one. The sender turns out to be Stephen Morley (a marvelously oily performance by Lyle Bettger), the man who got her pregnant in the backstory and is therefore the biological father of Helen’s son. We know Helen is about to be exposed as an imposter when we see Morley’s alternate girlfriend, listed in the dramatis personae only as “The Blonde” (Carole Mathews), at a dance party Helen attends as the date of the late Hugh Harkness’s brother Bill (John Lund, a dull actor Paramount tried giving a star buildup to). Later Helen is accosted by Stephen Morley himself, who demands that she pay him for his silence. When she writes him a check for $500 on an account the elder Harknesses have just opened for her, Morley announces that instead of leaving the small town of Caulfield, Illinois where the film is set, he’s going to demand that she marry him so he can grab one-third of the Harkness fortune whenever the elder Harknesses croak. Mrs. Harkness has already changed her will to give Helen a.k.a. Patrice three-fourths of the fortune instead of splitting it evenly down the middle between Bill and the now-dead Hugh. Morley puts the $500 check in an envelope along with an incriminating document specifying Helen’s real identity, and threatens to mail it to the Caulfield police unless Helen agrees to the marriage.

The wedding ceremony takes place in a nearby town and is officiated by a justice of the peace (Gordon Nelson) with his wife (Virginia Brissac) and son (Anthony Cowan) as witnesses. Once it’s over, Stephen drives Helen to his live-work space under the business name “Superior Investments” (an ironic name that’s one of the few flashes of creativity in the Benson/Turney script), and Bill tries to follow but loses control of his car in the snow. By the time he tracks Helen down, she’s in the office of Superior Investments but Stephen is lying in bed, clearly already dead. We hear a shot ring out and presume Helen has shot Stephen with a .38 revolver she got from the Harknesses’ desk drawer, but later Bill (though not Helen, who goes on thinking that she shot Stephen) checks the gun and finds bullets in all its chambers. Then there’s a series of plot reversals that, though they don’t appear to be Cornell Woolrich’s work, have his fingerprints all over them: first [spoiler alert!], Mrs. Harkness writes a dying declaration just before she croaks from a heart attack in which she confesses to the murder herself, saying she sneaked over to Stephen’s live-work space and shot him to spare Helen, whom she’s come to love as part of her family, from his schemes. Then [double spoiler alert!] it turns out that both Helen’s and Mrs. Harkness’s guns were .38’s and Stephen was shot with a .32 – and “The Blonde” was the actual killer. No Man of Her Own is one of those frustrating films that could have been great, especially with writers more sensitive to the noir world than Sally Benson and Catherine Turney, and with a better leading man as well. TCM showed it as part of a night of Stanwyck’s crime films that also included Billy Wilder’s film noir masterpiece, Double Indemnity (1944), as well as Anatole Litvak’s Sorry, Wrong Number (1948) – and when I posted to moviemagg about Sorry, Wrong Number (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2012/12/sorry-wrong-number-paramount-1948.html), I expressed the wish that John Garfield could have been her leading man in that film instead of the comparatively wooden Burt Lancaster.

Garfield would also have been a far better choice to play Bill Harkness in No Man of Her Own – though part of the problem there lay with Benson and Turney, who put absolutely nothing in their script about the obvious unease Bill would feel about dating and falling in love with his sister-in-law (not that Lund could have acted it effectively if they had). The film does include a marvelous dialogue exchange in which Helen, recovering in the hospital from the train crash, casually asks one of the nurses who’s paying for her care. She’s told – no surprise – that the Harknesses are because they consider her “family” and her son to be their long-awaited grandchild. If they weren’t, the nurse explains, she’d be in the “charity ward” and get either substandard care or almost none at all. It’s a neat little indictment of America’s preposterous profit-driven health care system at a time when Congressional Republicans and conservative Democrats had just blocked President Harry Truman’s proposal for national health insurance. It also contains snatches of voice-over dialogue from Stanwyck’s character, expressing her skepticism that she can maintain the “Patrice Harkness” identity forever and she’s bound to get caught sometime. There’s even a neat borrowing from the Ken Maynard Western Smoking Guns in which Helen inadvertently almost gives the game away when she doesn’t recognize the song “Molly Malone,” which was the real Hugh Harkness’s favorite – though fortunately for her the elder Harknesses write that off as a memory lapse caused by the accident. (In Smoking Guns the scene was reversed: the impostor plays a music-box record of a song the person he’s posing as actively hated.) What saves No Man of Her Own is Stanwyck’s typically intense performance as Helen a.k.a. Patrice – and equally fine work by Jane Cowl as well as two first-rate bad guys in Lyle Bettger and Carole Mathews, whose appearances (especially Mathews’s) are indelible. Mathews should have had a major career in these sorts of femme fatale roles; instead her career got sidetracked into the wilderness of series television.