Barbara Stanwyck chews her way through another knotty melodrama in No Man of Her Own, a fraughtly plotted and deliciously implausible story about a desperate woman who gets into trouble after accidentally assuming another woman’s identity.
But first, an introduction to the characters. In particular Helen Ferguson (Stanwyck), initially encountered wailing and distressed outside an apartment door. Inside is Steve (Lyle Bettger) and his new woman. Steve has no intention of letting the sobbing Helen in, but he does slip enough money under the door for her to buy a train ticket for a one-way trip out of his life. If we haven’t worked it out already we soon will: Steve is a heel and Helen is pregnant with his child.
Off the distraught woman heads, back to wherever she originally came from. On the train, Helen is befriended by a nice young couple. Patrice (Phyllis Thaxter) instantly spots that Helen is pregnant, as is she, but just as the two are getting better acquainted a train crash kills nearly everyone on board, sparing Helen but annihilating Patrice and husband Hugh Harkness (Richard Denning).
For plot reasons too complex and spoilerish to really detail, Helen winds up being taken in by Hugh’s rich family, who had never met Patrice and mistakenly believe that Helen is she. Too injured to lodge an objection, Helen gradually recovers, but by the time she has done so she is emotionally invested. So are the Harknesses, who believe “Patrice” is pregnant with their dead son’s child and lavish every conceivable luxury on her, unaware she’s a cuckoo in the nest (strictly, it’s her newborn baby who’s the cuckoo, but you get the idea).
That’s the set-up. Quite an elaborate one. The pay-off is a “when will the other shoe drop” affair, a case of watching “Patrice” as she negotiates her new surroundings, trying not to get caught out when, for example, she does not recognise her dead husband’s favourite song.
At the same time another dynamic, centred on the dead Hugh’s very-much-alive brother, Bill (John Lund), who falls for “Patrice”. And yet another, as we start to suspect that materfamilias Mrs Harkness (Jane Cowl) has her doubts about “Patrice” but for reasons of her own is playing along. And still one more when Steve re-enters the plot, threatening to blow Helen’s cover if she doesn’t play nice with him.
It is a ratchet of a story, a case of being forced to go along with the consequences of decisions taken while incapacitated. In case we ask why Helen doesn’t fess up when she’s fully recovered, on more than one occasion we get a glimpse of her thinking – she’s doing the best for her child, which is possibly true, possibly self-deception.
This tangle of motivations mean this film is never lacking in psychological interest, and Stanwyck excels at playing women on the horns of something. At this point she and director Mitchell Leisen had already made one “problem movie” together, 1939’s Remember the Night, when she played a shoplifter whose attorney fell for her, another case of wonky relationship dynamics.
She’s helped by a good cast. As Bill, Lund radiates a vanilla decency, and is the counterweight to Bettger’s Steve, a properly horrible, supercilious and sneery villain whose comeuppance must surely be coming down the line. Jane Cowl is particularly good as Mrs Harkness, the embodiment of the sort of fine values that rich people have in spades and poor people can only aspire to.
No Man of Her Own – the title makes it sound like a noir, because what is more dangerous than an unattached female? But though Hugo Friedhofer lays on the blaring brass and Daniel Fapp the shadowy noirish lighting, this is not noir. Helen is not a femme fatale, quite the opposite. She is not the representative of dark fate here on earth but its plaything. And a film noir would never dare go for the “well that’s all fine then”, slightly too slick dénouement delivered here. Caveats be damned, this is still a film well worth tucking into.
No Man of Her Own – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
