A Woman's Secret (Nicholas Ray, 1949)

[The following is a contribution to the Nicholas Ray Blog-A-Thon for Tony Dayoub's Cinema Viewfinder.]

A Woman's Secret feels like a test run for its maker. It presages the following year's far more sturdy and aesthetically adveturous Born to Be Bad in its plot elements and noir-tinctured melodrama. Yet if the film looks forward to Ray's career to come, it also represents a step backwards for the man whose raw energy made They Live By Night one of the emotive of noirs. A Woman's Secret (a misnomer, as there's no real mystery in this movie), is too buttoned down, too reminiscent of better movies made before and since, to make much of an impact for anyone save Ray completists.

Herman J. Mankiewicz's script conveys his caustic brand of wit, but his screenplay bizarrely seems a first draft of his brother Joseph's superior treatment of All About Eve, which makes pointed satire out of the broader showbiz melancholy seen here. But the flashback structure he used to unravel the life of Charles Foster Kane works better to contextualize and empathize with a character. As he tries to string out a series of self-serving recollections from truth-twisting suspects and lawyers, Mankiewicz fails to maintain any suspense, and by the time a key clue unlocks the story, the narrative has moved in such a disjointed, uninterested fashion that one is hard-pressed to care. This is the only film I can think of that can begin with a woman shooting another woman and still feel pedestrian. That is is a Nicholas Ray film makes its zero-Kelvin stagnation all the more upsetting.