No Man's Woman (1955)

hyped garbage

Fresh and Exciting

A brilliant film that helped define a genre

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Above average murder mystery about a greedy, scheming woman who 'gets it' and the cops think the husband did it.Nothing original, but the film is a sprint from start to finish so you shouldn't get bored. For a supposedly 'B movie', this has an excellent cast of players. Lots of pretty girls, weather beaten cops and a hunk or two for the womenfolk... Marie Windsor is particularly fun to watch playing the manipulative wife... which she did twice, a year later, in Kubrick's 'The Killing' and Corman's 'Swamp Women'. (I wonder what she was like in real life!)The first half of the movie presents the case for 'offing' the nasty woman and the second half is spent finding out who-dunnit. The running time of just over an hour goes by quickly, there's not a moment wasted. You won't be disappointed in this 'Perry Mason' style caper.

The wide eyed Marie Windsor has a blast in this deliciously fun B film noir as the long estranged wife of John Archer who refuses his settlement for a divorce when he falls in love with the sweet Nancy Gates. She then sets her eyes on Richard Crane, the hunky boyfriend of her naive assistant Jil Jamyn, utilize zing a fishing trip with him as an excuse for Jamyn to return her engagement ring. Slaps from Archer and a slap for Crane bring out more of the viper in Windsor, setting up plenty of motive for murder! Toss in Patric Knowles as Windsor's slimy art reporter lover, and the number of suspects expands greatly. This mixture of soap opera and film noir (with comic dialog filled with innuendo and bitchy asides) is plenty of fun, fully in tuned with Republic Pictures' ideal of even making the most of their glorious "B" films, the highest grade of programmers in the film industry. Windsor has a field day as this aging seductress, willing to seduce the husband she hates if it served a purpose. I'm grateful that they didn't cast Vera Ralston in the Windsor role as the high rating I give this would have been cut in half. I only wish that there was another 20 minutes of what lead to the separation of Windsor and Archer, but what's there in the 70 minutes is delicious fun.

Remember how the Perry Mason show always started with a drama about a bunch of unfamiliar characters, one of whom went out of his or her way to be nasty to all the others, leaving a nice collection of suspects for the viewer to sort through after he or she was murdered? The beginning of this film, made two years before the Mason show debuted, will bring back memories of those episodes. There's no shrewd defense attorney or even a courtroom scene but, again Mason-like, it was filmed in sunny 1950's L. A. with slick professionalism and an almost anonymous cast, with the exception of renowned noir femme fatale Marie Windsor.As usual in such dramas, the cops set their sights on the wrong suspect. In this case, however, the suspects themselves work out who's the guilty party. In brief, a straightforward well-made little whodunit that moves along briskly and should keep you engaged for eighty minutes or so.

As mysteries go, No Man's Woman runs in the league of those populous puzzles that fueled so many old Perry Mason episodes: a lot of suspects, one of whom will be fingered. But the movie preserves a starring performance by Marie Windsor, one of the all-time great broads of post-war poverty-row movies. She leads in more of them than one might think, most of them obscure (if not vanished) westerns, sci-fi cheapies, and crime programmers. But, top billing or not, we get to see less of Windsor in No Man's Woman that we might like – too many people want her dead.Among them: her industrialist husband (John Archer) whom she won't divorce unless he forks over a ruinous settlement; his girlfriend (Jil Jarmyn), whose pleas Windsor coldly rebuffs; Windsor's art critic paramour/business partner (Patric Knowles), who writes puff-pieces for her gallery and gets fired for conflict of interest (today they'd call it `synergy'); her loyal young assistant (Nancy Gates), whose fiancé she blithely tries to steal; and the fiancé (Richard Crane), onto whose boat she invites herself in order to seduce then blackmail him.Windsor, as one exchange between characters goes, is `a witch...whichever way it's spelled.' When her wicked-woman machinations have reached the boil, and just about everyone has indiscreetly remarked how they'd like to see her dead, a 3-a.m. intruder into her studio grants their wishes. And so the search for the murderer is on....Much like the roles Joan Crawford at this juncture in her career was playing in A-productions, Windsor's character is that of an honey-voiced schemer hiding her self-interest beneath a facade of piss-elegance – with every petty victory, the huge orbs of her eyes flash with satisfaction. She was more memorable in The Narrow Margin and The Killing (better movies), but what she delivers makes one wonder why she never broke out of the B-movie ghetto.