Woman on the Run

Ann Sheridan and Dennis O'Keefe

Norman Foster's Woman on the Run is a pretty good noir from 1950. This black and white B feature, long thought lost, has been lovingly restored and put out on disc by Flicker Alley. Ann Sheridan stars as Eleanor Johnson, a woman whose husband was witness to a mob hit and is on the run from both the gangsters and the police. She spends the flick racing about San Francisco seeking to find and aid her man. She is aided in this by tabloid reporter Dan Legget (Dennis O'Keefe) who appears quite willing to use checkbook journalism in order to get an exclusive story. The film reveals the identity of the hit man halfway through the picture and this increases rather than ameliorates the suspense. In this, the film is following Hitchcock's dictum that it is more fruitful to let the audience in on the peril facing a protagonist rather than randomly springing it on them. An audience will feel more terror and suspense when they know that a bomb's explosion is imminent rather than experiencing it as an unforeseen jump scare.   

The location shooting in San Francisco captures a blue collar, working port city that was long gone by the time I lived in Bagdad by the Bay in the 1980s. The opening murder sequence was shot in Los Angeles and the concluding amusement park sequence was shot in Santa Monica, but both are well integrated with the San Francisco footage. I especially enjoyed how Foster utilized the Santa Monica amusement park and its roller coaster to ratchet up the suspense in the final reel. A fatal rendezvous is scheduled to take place in the shadow of the roller coaster and Foster uses the coaster's edifice to reinforce the notion that the Johnsons are caught in a trap not of their own devise. A deterministic sense of doom permeates the film, one appropriate for noir. Eleanor finds herself confined on the coaster ride when she gleans that her husband is in mortal danger. She can only scream ineffectively as she rockets along the track. Theme and narrative are one as the protagonist's helpless plight is both metaphorically evoked and expressionistically portrayed.

Foster had started as actor, but by the late 1930s was wholly focused on directing films in Hollywood. He earned his spurs toiling on B features featuring Mr. Moto and Charlie Chan, but never really became a director of the first rank. Like many of his ilk, he had a healthy subsequent career directing television shows and films. I fondly remember the Davy Crockett films he directed for Disney. One aspect of his career that aided in keeping him obscure is his long association with Orson Welles. Foster certainly assisted Welles on It's All True, but the notion that Welles directed Foster's 1943 thriller Journey Into Fear seems to me a canard. Certainly the occasional portentous shot in Journey Into Fear smacks of Welles, though. Women on the Run also betrays Welles influence. Indeed, at times it seems a knockoff of Welles' The Lady From Shanghai, especially with its Orientalism, San Francisco settings, and amusement park climax. Foster use of tilted low angle shots (see above) to create a sense of dislocation and unease is very reminscent of Welles. The difference between the two is that between a journeyman and a genius. Foster is a solid craftsman in the service of his story whereas Welles marshals his effects and affects into creating a cosmos all his own. A world in which lurking evil is a far more palpable and sinister presence than anything found in Foster's films.

Women on the Run is greatly helped by a bevy of fine supporting performances that animate the film's portrayal of the gritty edges of San Francisco, especially by John Qualen, J. Farrell MacDonald, and Steven Geray. Robert Keith, father of Brian, is particularly effective as a police inspector who seems to relish his own cynicism. Dennis O'Keefe is good in a role that lets him show off his raffish qualities. However, this is all Ann Sheridan's picture in more ways than one. Women on the Run was Sheridan's baby, an independent picture that she produced and partially financed after the ending of her contract with Warner Brothers. She was thirty five and apparently no longer young enough to play the oomph girl, though I think she is plenty sexy in both this and the previous year's I Was a Male War Bride. One thing I like about her performance is the ambiguity she projects towards her absent husband. Her Eleanor is not a meek doormat, but a breathing, feeling creature with the conflicting feelings that exist in all mature relationships. It is a brave and ballsy act, but it brought her little acclaim at the time. Woman on the Run was released by Universal who signed Sheridan to a new contract, but it could not prevent a career decline for Southern who died prematurely in 1967.