No Man of Her Own

Lyle Bettger, Barbara Stanwyck and John Lund

Mitchell Leisen's No Man of Her Own is a better than average neo-noir from 1950. This film has nothing to do with the other Paramount release with this particular title from 1932 and was based on a Cornell Woolrich novel with a better title, 1948's I Married A Dead Man. The material has been adapted numerous times, the most notable being a 1996 remake, released as Mrs. Winterbourne with Ricki Lake in the role played in 1950 by Barbara Stanwyck. Stanwyck's character is a pregnant and unmarried woman whose heel of a boyfriend (Lyle Bettger) has spurned her and given her a $5 bill and a train ticket out of town. On the train, she befriends a young couple who are also expecting. After a bathroom scene that beggars belief (in which Stanwyck puts on the wedding ring of her newfound chum), the train derails and Stanwyck wakes in the hospital with the staff telling her that she has given birth to a boy, but has lost her husband. 

Stanwyck's character is put upon and broke, as she often was earlier in her career, thus she eagerly impersonates the dead woman. Luckily her in-laws have never seen a picture of their son's new bride, so Stanwyck moves into their well-appointed manse in small town Illinois. She gets along well with her in-laws and draw the romantic interest of the dead man's brother (John Lund), but her past catches up with her in the form of a blackmailing Bettger. The film's screenwriters, Sally Benson and Catherine Turney, retain the flashback structure of the book in which we first meet Stanwyck and Lund, now wed, waiting in that manse as the police arrive to, we think, arrest one or both of them for murder. This opening device is effectively shot by Leisen who tracks the camera down the all American street and into the protagonists' living room where a pan lovingly caresses the interior. Leisen, best known for his gay comedies, was reaching the end of his tenure at Paramount, but was trying to adapt to changing tastes. The opening strikes an interesting Hitchcockian note of evil lurking in the heart of the homeland. 

Not all of the screenwriter's efforts prove fruitful. Stanwyck is given voiceover monologues expressing her character's anxieties and dilemmas, but they prove cumbersome and redundant. On the plus side, there is a distinct feminist slant to the scenario that is not in the Woolrich original that helps make Stanwyck's character more sympathetic. Certainly, this is one of the earliest American features to feature a Caesarian section. Whoever was responsible for the train wreck and subsequent hospital sequence in which Stanwyck undergoes a C-section to deliver her premature child deserves kudos for boldness at the very least. A mirror in the railcar bathroom explodes into shards, the railcar set rotates, and then we see the hospital from Stanwyck's POV, first from a gurney then from an operating table. This is a similar POV to the one Frank Borzage utilized from the perspective of a wounded Gary Cooper in his version of A Farewell to Arms.

Unfortunately, No Man of Her Own loses some steam after this and becomes a very familiar
 melodrama. The cast is, in general, adequate rather than outstanding. Bettger was always an effective villain, so much so that he became typecast. John Lund's performances always verge on the catatonic, but Leisen got him to produce a faint simulacrum of passion here. Milburn Stone, "Doc" on Gunsmoke, is effective in a bit part. Stanwyck is always nonpareil, but it is Jane Cowl who delivers the most memorable performance as her doomed mother-in-law. Cowl was mostly known as a stage actress, only appearing on film in a few silents and a handful of roles after World War 2. That Cowl was soon to depart this veil herself gives her sensitive performance an added sense of rue that she did not leave us more of her work on film.