TCM first broadcast the 1950 film noir Woman On the Run in April 2019 with this introduction by Noir Alley host Eddie Muller. I only caught up with the film on January 24 this year when it was rebroadcast with a terrific introduction by Muller and guest Ernest Dickerson. The two of them hit all the points I would want to make about the merits of the movie with a winning enthusiasm. I wish I could give you that introduction, but I can’t. I can only direct you to Muller’s 2019 intro at the link above. As he states toward the end, he rescued the film from destruction and, I would add, from oblivion.
Muller wrote an attractive coffee-table book studying the genre: Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir. Muller devotes two rich pages to Woman On the Run co-producer and star Ann Sheridan.
Woman On the Run is a most unusual noir. As in other films of the genre, we have the requisite shadows, we have the angular shots, and we have the hard-boiled characters. Unlike the standard noir, however, the film features no femme fatale — just femme. Muller aptly describes the film as a love story told in reverse. “Hunting her husband,” Muller writes, “Eleanor [the Ann Sheridan character] learns how their love went sour — and falls in love with Frank all over again.” If Sheridan’s character is a femme fatale, she is a femme fatale in reverse.
Shot on location in San Francisco, the film not only provides a glimpse of the lost world of film noir. It also provides a glimpse of the lost world of San Francisco.
In the book, as in his on-air introduction with Dickerson last month, Muller has more on co-writer Alan Campbell (husband of Dorothy Parker) and director Norman Foster, a protégé of Orson Welles, but enough said. This is a holiday weekend and the film runs only 76 minutes. Now in the public domain, it has been posted on YouTube in the video below.
Michael Keaney’s Film Noir Guide gives the film three-and-a-half stars (out of five). I found the film to be a lost gem and thought some readers might enjoy it. If not, as the Yeats poem puts it, “Horseman, pass by!”
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