The Man I Love (Warner Bros., First National, 1946, released 1947)

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

After Rear Window and Paper Moon on Turner Classic Movies Saturday, June 20, “Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller ran an O.K. but quite confusing movie called The Man I Love, made at Warner Bros. in 1945 but not finished until a year later. The Man I Love began life as Night Shift, the second novel by author Maritta Wolff, published in 1942, the year after her debut book, Whistle Stop. Both books really pushed the envelope of the Motion Picture Production Code, but they sold well enough that they got turned into movies, albeit heavily rewritten: Whistle Stop by independent producer Seymour Nebenzal with George Raft and Ava Gardner starring and Léonide Moguy directing; and Night Shift at Warner Bros. with Raoul Walsh directing and Catherine Turney and Jo Pagano writing the screenplay. According to “Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller, Warners originally planned it for an “A”-list cast, with Ann Sheridan as the struggling nightclub singer Petey Brown and Humphrey Bogart as the corrupt nightclub owner Nicky Toresca, who employs her as a singer and wants to get in her pants. Ultimately the film was cast with Ida Lupino as Petey and Robert Alda as Nicky – so right after having played George Gershwin in the biopic Rhapsody in Blue, Alda (Alan Alda’s father, by the way) ended up cast in a movie named after one of Gershwin’s most famous songs. Unfortunately, Lupino was on such a tight schedule she literally suffered from exhaustion, and during one scene with Alda she fainted on set and had to have her expensive gown cut off to be rescued. The Man I Love is a weird mix of family drama, jazz musical, and film noir. When the film starts Petey is working in a New York nightclub (Ida Lupino’s vocals were dubbed by Peg La Centra, Artie Shaw’s first female singer and later the wife of actor Paul Stewart) but she’s homesick for her family in Los Angeles. It’s not all that clear exactly how the various characters are related to each other, but eventually we learn that Petey has two sisters, Virginia Brown (Martha Vickers, the marvelous nymphomaniac in The Big Sleep but sadly underutilized here) and Sally Otis (Andrea King), a strait-laced woman whose husband Roy (John Ridgely) is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder caused by his service in World War II. (Though the film isn’t copyrighted until 1947 the production overlapped the end of the war, so it’s not surprising the conflict features in the plot.)

Petey also has a brother, Johnny O’Connor (Don McGuire), whose wife Gloria (Dolores Moran, the “other woman” introduced in the 1945 film To Have and Have Not that brought Bogart and his fourth wife, Lauren Bacall, together) is bored being stuck at home while Johnny works nights to support them and their twin kids. She wants to live the nightclub lifestyle and goes after Nicky Toresca, who has a club and employs Petey as a singer. Nicky is enough of a slimeball, especially where the women who work for him are concerned, that in one chilling scene he tells one of the cigarette girls to stay after work, only to rescind the invitation when he gets what he thinks is a better offer. Things turn around, it seems, for Petey when she goes to another nightclub, the Bamboo Club, and meets down-and-out piano player San Thomas (Bruce Bennett), the one genuinely conflicted character in the film. San was headed for a major career in jazz when he blew it all by falling in love with a bored socialite who married him, then dumped him and thereby sent him off the deep end into alcoholic oblivion. Now she’s returned to L.A. and seems to be after him again, and Petey tries her best to keep them apart. Instead San ends up shipping out as a sailor and the two have a bittersweet farewell on the dock as she sees him off in an ending Eddie Muller suspected was ripped off from the one in Casablanca, down to the “Here’s looking at you … ” line as the two part.

The Man I Love was filmed under the title Why Was I Born?, after a 1929 Jerome Kern song that, like “The Man I Love” itself, featured prominently in the plot. Warner Bros. had bought the music publisher Chappell and Company, which owned the rights to much of the “Great American Songbook,” and they exploited that catalog to the hilt in making this movie – though one song proved problematic when the film was released to television in 1956. It was “Bill,” written by Jerome Kern to a lyric by P. G., Wodehouse for a 1917 musical called Oh, Lady! Lady!!, not used in that show but recycled a decade later when Kern and Oscar Hammerstein, Jr. needed a melancholy number for a scene in their 1927 masterpiece, Show Boat. Unfortunately whatever deals Warners had made for the rights to the other songs in the film didn’t include “Bill,” so rather than negotiate and pay a new licensing fee Warner Bros. cut the song and its six-minute presentation completely from the TV version and all subsequent prints. It wasn’t restored to the film until 2024. The Man I Love is a lumbering beast of a movie, proof that Catherine Turney had no business writing a film noir (she had worked on the more soap-opera aspects of Mildred Pierce, but Ranald MacDougall had written the more hard-boiled noir scenes and had ultimately got sole credit for adapting the James M. Cain novel on which Mildred Pierce was based). I wouldn’t call The Man I Love a great movie, or even a not-so-great movie with a great movie in it struggling to get out; instead it’s a film that achieves a level of competent mediocrity and hits on a lot of the Hollywood conventions and clichés of the time without saying much new about any of them.