TCM’s Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at 12:30 and 10 a.m. ET is Michael Gordon’s Woman in Hiding (1949) with Ida Lupino, Howard Duff, Stephen McNally, Peggy Dow and John Litel

By David in TN
friday, january 26, 2024 at 4:32:00 p.m. est

TCM’s Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at 12:30 and 10 a.m. ET is Michael Gordon’s Woman in Hiding (1949) with Ida Lupino, Howard Duff, Stephen McNally, Peggy Dow and John Litel.

Film Noir Guide: “Lupino stars as a newlywed whose husband (McNally) is trying to kill her so he can inherit the mill once owned by her rich father (Litel), whom he has already murdered. While fleeing town, Lupino loses control of her car, thanks to McNally’s brake-tampering job, and it plunges into a creek. She escapes death but realizes that the police will not believe her story so she must ‘stay dead’ until she finds McNally’s girlfriend (Dow), who she thinks will back up her claim that McNally is trying to kill her.”

David in TN: I have never seen this one. This is its first showing by TCM. In last week’s outro for Stage Fright, one of Hitchcock’s underwhelming films, Red Eddie Muller said, in effect, “Don’t blame me if you didn't like it.”

N.S.: Red Eddie should say that every week! Except that, as it’s his show, you’re always justified in blaming him.

I’d see anything featuring or starring Ida Lupino. During the 1940s and ‘50s, she was a force of nature. As a director and screenwriter, too (e.g., The Hitchhiker, starring Sweaty Eddie O'Brien, Everyman Frank Lovejoy, and Unblinking William Talman).

Stephen McNally made a pretty good living, playing heavies. In Johnny Belinda (1948), he raped the titular, deaf-mute character (Jane Wyman), and beat her within an inch of her life. The performance got Wyman her Oscar, and was, I believe, the first crip Oscar. Wyman was surely aided and abetted by a split vote between two greats, each of whom was in her last nomination: Irene Dunne, for I Remember Mama, and Barbara Stanwyck, for Sorry, Wrong Number. Some Academy voters may have had to flip a coin.

In Winchester ‘73, McNally graduated to father-killer! He played a man who murdered his own father, in order to steal the legendary, eponymous rifle. However, in the first Anthony Mann Western, both star Jimmy Stewart and McNally are upstaged by a second heavy, a psycho-killer played by Dan Duryea, who turns female lead Shelley Winters into his sex slave, and steals the picture.

Winchester ‘73 was written by “Borden Chase” (real name, Frank Fowler, who in a previous life had been a driver for Prohibition mobster, Frankie Yale). In 1947 (which wasn’t released until 1948, due supposedly to dueling lawsuits), Chase is credited with having invented the subgenre of “the psychological Western,” in Red River, in which Howard Hawks butchered Chase’s screenplay, and turned it into a big, sloppy mess of a picture.

(Certain directors, above all, Anthony Mann, loved to toy with the Hays Code. In his last Western, 1958’s Man of the West, starring Gary Cooper, after the Jimmy Stewart accordion incident, there’s a scene in which, I believe, the bad guys gang-rape female lead and saloon singer—in the picture, and in real life—Julie London. Except that, owing to the Code, Mann couldn’t show that. So, he turns the scene into one in which the bad guys force her to do a strip-tease. But the shattered character of London doesn’t make sense for a girl who just did a forced strip-tease. It does, however, make perfect sense for a girl who was just gang-raped.

The real act of willed imagining, however, is in fantasizing that the lead is played by Jimmy Stewart, for whom Mann had planned the picture, and not “Coop,” who was much too old for the role.)

The movies used to be so much more interesting than they are now, because they were made by tremendously talented people, and those people led interesting lives, unlike today’s mediocre, political hacks.