Woman on the Run

In Brief: Almost startlingly good — and just barely rescued from oblivion — film noir from generally overlooked director Norman Foster. Co-writing the independently produced Woman on the Run (1950) with Alan Campbell, Foster came up with an unusually intelligent (and suspenseful without being in the least graphic) noir that made excellent use of its fading stars while cashing in on the growing mania for location shooting. The essential plot is pretty basic: A man (Ross Elliott) witnesses a murder and goes into hiding rather than be put into police custody to testify against the mob. What's unusual is that it's his embittered wife (Ann Sheridan) who — with the help of a newspaper reporter (Dennis O'Keefe) — goes in search of her husband, discovering along the way that she really didn't know him at all. There's a plot twist about halfway through that you'll probably guess before you get to it, but the story remains engaging and the film is atmospheric — complete with a riot of Dutch angles. The ending obviously owes a lot to Orson Welles' The Lady from Shanghai (1947) but is still suspenseful despite the overuse of rear-screen in the scenes with Sheridan on a roller coaster.