Strong enough for a man, but made for a woman?

Gloria Grahame had a day in Summer Under the Stars this past August, so I recorded one of her movies that I hadn't done a blog post on before: A Woman's Secret. Recently, I watched it so I could do a post on it here.

Grahame plays Susan Caldwell, a singer and actress who performs on the radio under the stage name Estrellita. She finishes up her radio show one night and goes back to her posh apartment in Manhattan where she lives with her friend who discovered her, Marian Washburn (Maureen O'Hara). Susan announces that she's going to give up performing, which causes an argument between the two women. Susan goes up to her room, Marian following her into the room. We then hear a gun shot, and Susan is gravely injured.

Unsusprisingly, the police, in the form of lead investigator Fowler (Jay C. Flippen) arrest Marian and hold her on a charge of attempted murder. What's much more surprising is that Marian confesses right away, basically shushing anybody around her who might try to stop her. One of those who would try to stop Marian is Luke Jordan (Melvyn Douglas). He's a pianist and bon vivant who also appears on radio shows due to his knowledge of all genres of music. He's convinced Marian couldn't have shot Susan, and is going to try to get Marian cleared of the charges, even if Marian doesn't seem to want to.

To that end, Luke impresses upon lawyer Brook Matthews (Victor Jory), who was apparently romantically involved with both Marian and Susan at different times, to take on Marian's case, even though he'll have a client who doesn't want him to represent her and in spite of that convoluted back story. As you can guess, since all of this happens in roughly the first quarter of the movie, we're going to get a flashback as to what really happened. Well, that only comes after half a movie's worth of Luke giving the back story involving himself and the two women.

Susan had been a singer herself back before the war, but she got some sort of illness that took away the qualities in her voice that made her a good singer, leaving her with a voice that's fine for talking but not singing. Around this time Marian and Luke discover Susan, and since she's got some talent, the start building her up, with Marian becoming a sort of manager. So there's the possibility that if Susan retires, it would take away Marian's meal ticket. Add in a GI they met in France (Bill Williams) and things get even more complicated.

In fact, I think a big part of the problem is that A Woman's Secret is too complicated for its own good. There's also not much of a secret going on here. If it's not attempted murder then there are only one or two other possibilities; it's not as if an attempted murder with a bunch of different suspects. But the biggest problem of them all is that the writing came across as flat. It's just really hard to get emotionially involved in the story of any of these characters, and that's a pretty big failing. All of the stars do the best they can with the material they're given, but in the end it's just not enough.