with this ring
by Douglas Messerli
Sally Benson, Catherine Tunney, and
Mitchell Leisen (screenplay), Mitchell Leisen (director) No Man of Her Own / 1950
Mitchell Leisen’s 1950 film, No Man of Her Own, takes novelist Cornell Woolrich’s I Married a Dead Man in strange directions, crossing what the 1940s and 1950s often describes as a “women’s picture” with the generally male-dominated film-noir genre, while simultaneously seeming to toy with the strictures of the Hays Code. On one hand the convoluted and often quite unbelievable plot seems closer to Douglas Sirk’s soap-opera confabulations of later in the decade. Yet Leisen’s work, much darker and lushly filmed in black-and-white, at times, becomes a sexually coded film that, in the end, allows his female characters near-complete dominance.
The film begins a long series of
appositions as the voice of the film’s central figure, Helen Ferguson describes
the lovely beauty of the small Illinois town in which she has found herself,
the camera tracking down rows of stately trees and honeysuckle as it enters a
grand house where she lives, she with her young son on her lap, her loving
husband sitting across. Everything, she gushes is a beautiful in a life which
cannot be enjoyed. Despite the deep love the couple feel for one another, she
proclaims, one or the other will have to leave, and their near-perfect life
will be destroyed. The tension in the room is palpable as the couple
tentatively plan a night out. An interrupting phone call seemingly terrifies
them both; at the other end are the police who announce they will soon arrive.
The only question is an odd one: which one of them are the police in search of?
The young married couple, Patrice (Phyllis Thatcher) and Hugh Harkness
(Richard Denning) are the first truly friendly faces in the film. Patrice, the
more affable of the two, immediately strikes up a conversation with Helen,
admitting that she too is pregnant, and sending off her husband for a couple of
“smokes,” presumably so that she and her new friend can chat. It is an odd
gesture, symbolic of a sudden intensity between the two women, which is even
further played out over dinner conversation and a late night visit to the
toilet, where, Patrice shares her face cream with her new friend and, of far
more significance, asks her to hold her wedding ring, eventually even putting
the diamond ring upon Helen’s finger.
While certainly this entire scene suggests a kind of hidden sexual
relationship it, more importantly, suggests a deeper kind of “marriage”; for
before Helen can even hint at the old wives’ tale that such an act leads to bad
luck, the train itself explodes into a vortex of destruction, continued for
several cinematic moments as we see one of the women wheeled into an ambulance
and, ultimately, staring face up at the doctors who operate upon her, the
operating-room lights whirling into a spin.
The saved woman and her child is Helen; both Patrice and her husband
have been killed. Because of the ring and the coincidence of both women being
pregnant, however, Helen has been mistakenly identified by the doctors as
Patrice. Despite Helen’s muted attempts to explain the truth, she, pacified and
drugged, is unable to speak out, soon after realizing that were she to identify
her real self, she and her baby would be laying not in a private room but in
the general ward. Gifts are sent by the Harkness family, whom Patrice and Hugh
have been on their way to visit. For the sake of her child, Patrice continues
to play along with the mistaken identity. Finding herself hurtling through
space on yet another train to the small Midwestern town in which Patrice’s
in-laws reside, she is suddenly horrified by her own deception.
The crisis she is facing, it is
apparent, is not very different from a gay man or woman—such as like the
bisexual director Leisen—pretending he or she is straight, allowing those
around to deceive themselves about his or her real sexuality/identity, and
there is both a kind of thrilling terror in the act that provides the deceiver
with a sense of power, both of which come through in Stanwyck’s excellent
acting.
The elder Harknesses, superbly realized
by Jane Cowl and Henry O’Neill, as well as their maid (the outspoken Esther
Dale) could not be more welcoming and embracing. While the real Patrice had
worried whether they would like her (they have never seen her, not even a
photograph), it is clear that, despite some vague lapses of knowledge and
inexplicable reactions—which the family attributes to her hospitalization and
shock of her husband’s death— the “new” Patrice and family are perfectly
suited, almost as if the “false” Patrice were better than the real thing.
The family’s benevolence goes farther, moreover, with the arrival of
Hugh’s younger brother, Bill (John Lund), who not only is friendly to the
deceiver, but quickly falls in love with her, despite, as it is later revealed,
he has suspected Helen’s deception from the beginning. Again, the sexual
innuendos here further strengthen the resolve of the “gay” deceiver. She has
not only, symbolically speaking, “wedded” Patrice, she has entered her body,
literally “become” her. And despite her protests, the family alters their will
to further reward her and the new family heir.
Such a bizarre acting out of identity can only lead to complications,
which soon arrive the form of Helen’s former sleazy boyfriend, Morley, who
begins by sending her cryptic telegrams (“Who are you? And why are you here?)
before quickly escalating into bribery, lies and, finally, into a demand that
Helen/Patrice marry him—the plot revealing our suspicions that Helen’s son was
born out of wedlock—so that this sinister figure out of her past might inherit
her money when the elder, sickly generation dies off. Desperate to keep her
past a secret, to protect her son and herself, and save her in-laws from the
painful revelations, Helen/Patrice has little choice but to give into his
demands in a kind of mad-scene marriage, part of which is accidently overhead
in a phone call to the Harkness house. Bill is sent out to find her, while
Helen/Patrice is dumped back on the Harkness porch. The horrifying words “’Til
death do us part,” still ringing in her head (another of the sexual inversions
in this film) Helen/Patrice determines to make that phrase a reality, grabbing
a gun from her father-in-law’s desk and rushing out of the house, determined to
kill her enforced husband, without perceiving that her equally determined
mother-in-law has observed her actions. A long-time heart condition ends in the
elderly woman’s death.
As we return to the scene of the first
few moments of the film, we now comprehend that she and Bill have married and
attempted to make a good life for themselves, despite all they have done and
the guilt that faces both of them. Now we can truly comprehend why the police
might come for either one.
Just before the police arrive, however, the writer and director throw in
another wrench of the plot that reveals just how powerful the women of this
film have become. Josie, the family maid, explains that just before the old
woman’s death she had insisted upon writing a letter to her daughter-in-law. In
that letter Mrs. Harkness admits to having killed Morley in order to protect
Helen/Patrice. It seems that Bill might be even willing to use the letter in
their defense, despite the fact that Helen/Patrice refuses to allow him such an
out, knowing that the epistle has simply been another example of her
mother-in-law’s great love and largesse.
As the police enter, Helen, abandoning
all pretense, admits to having shot her ex-husband. But when she identifies the
gun, they tell her that, although her bullet was found in the mattress, the
murder weapon was another one. The murderer, we discover, was Morley’s
blond-haired girl, Irma, of the very first scene, who shot him in revenge for
his having left her! So are the film’s great deceivers reunited in bliss, able
now to live out the lives which, given their true selves, they never imagined
they might have been able to have experienced. It now makes no difference
whether Helen, free to fully become Patrice, has been straight with Bill or
not; it no longer matters whether or not he has purposely allowed himself to be
deceived or not. So Leisen, I would argue, has created an oddly “gay” fable out
of heterosexual drama. And, in the end, we must ask, which “dead ‘man’” did
Helen Ferguson ultimately marry? Was it the pleasant, now buried Hugh—whose
wife she pretended to be—the criminally uncaring Morley—with whom she was
forced to enter into a marriage contract—the personable and engaging
Patrice—whose ring, one imagines, remains on her finger and whose name she has
now embraced—or, perhaps, the ineffectual, yet abiding and still living Bill
Harkness? As the title suggests, it may not be “any man.” In 1950 those were
simply questions one did not ask.
Los Angeles, October 31, 2012
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2012).
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