Woman in Hiding

I mentioned at the beginning of the month how Ida Lupino was one of the people spotlighted in this year's Summer Under the Stars for whom I had a movie on my DVR that wasn't airing as part of her day. I've finally gotten to the point in my library where that movie is at the top of the list for movies I've watched but haven't blogged about yet: Woman in Hiding.

The movie starts off in a really interesting manner. Lupino's character is driving a car down a windy mountain road as the opening credits play, complete with dramatic music that implies she's racing away from... something. As the credits reach their end, she fails to navigate a curve, and the car crashes through a guardrail into the river down below.

Next up is the police having pulled the car up from the river, with it hanging from a bridge, without a body to show for it. We then hear the voice of Ida Lupino, informing us that it's her body that the police are dredging the river for, the voice of one Deborah Chandler. The camera then shows a man on the bridge with the police, at which point Deborah informs us she's Deborah Chandler Clark; the man on the bridge is Selden Clark IV (Stephen McNally).

As you might guess, the movie then goes into a flashback. Deborah Chandler is the daughter of John Chandler (John Litel), who owns the factory that's the big employer in the North Carolina town where they live. John has hired on Selden Clark IV as the factory's general manager, largely because the Clarks were the big family in town; in fact, the town, Clarksville, is named after one of Selden's ancestors. Selden and Deborah have fallen in love, but Dad really disapproves of the romance, largely because he considers the last couple generations of Clarks to be really terrible people.

And then Dad dies suddenly in an accident at the mill, freeing the way for Selden to marry Deborah, while Deborah becomes the owner of the mill. It would seem a match made in heaven, but Selden is extremely anxious for the match to go through, and Voiceover Deborah says she should have seen things for what they were much earlier considering how Selden made the wedding proposal on the day of her father's funeral. Still, she goes through with the wedding.

It's then that things really get nasty. Selden takes Deborah up to a cabin in the mountains for their honeymoon, and when they get there, waiting for them is one Patricia Monahan (Peggy Dow) of Raleigh. Patricia is equally nasty, only to Selden, but then she has good reason to be nasty. She was -- and may still be -- Selden's other woman, and she has no qualms about letting the married couple know about it. Indeed, she points out that Selden had told her that he was finished with Deborah a year ago, so we know he's lying about that half of the relationship.

Selden responds by kicking Patricia out, and then trying to keep Deborah cooped up in the cabin. Obviously, now that she knows the full truth of the matter -- well she really learns the full truth when she concludes that her father's death was no accident -- she decides she's going to make a break for it. But we're only about a half hour into a 90-minute movie, which means that the flashback doesn't take up the full movie.

As you might guess, Deborah is giving the voiceover because she did not in fact die in the car crash, which would also explain why they can't find the body. Selden is also convinced that Deborah didn't die, and is obsessive about finding her. Deborah heads off to Raleigh to try to find Patricia. At one of the bus stations, a demobbed soldier, Keith Ramsey (Howard Duff), is manning the newsstand. He's quite taken with Deborah, not realizing who she is, but eventually decides to help her. He doesn't understand just how much danger she's in, of course.

When Eddie Muller presented Woman in Hiding in Noir Alley, he commented that it was a movie that Ida Lupino didn't really want to make, implying that she was taking a paycheck to be able to do the stuff she really wanted to do. That's a bit harsh, since Woman in Hiding is an effective enough little movie. In writing this post, I suddenly found myself thinking of Sleeping With the Enemy, which has a fairly similar plot of a wife running away and the obsessive husband going to the ends of the earth to find her, although in that one the husband is even more over the top in the way he treats his wife.

The cast does well enough here, and the movie is certainly reasonably entertaining, even if it isn't the best movie any of the people involved made. It's definitely worth a watch the next time it shows up.