Thriller? Farce? A Woman’s Secret eventually collapses under the weight of its own indecision but until it does it’s a rapid-fire piece of brilliance, full of sparkling wit, weirdness, coded aberrant sexuality and lethal shenanigans including one woman trying to kill another, and that’s all in the first opening scenes.
It was a flop, and it’s easy to see why. Read it as a thriller and it’s no good at all. But watch it as a camp front-of-curtain entertainment by showbiz folks for showbiz folks and it makes a lot more sense.
The key roles are played by Gloria Grahame, who plays a big radio singer, who in opening scenes informs us that she’s just back from “New Orleans” – and there’s something about the way Grahame lays the emphasis that gives us to believe that this might mean the nuthouse. But whatever is, or was, up with Susan is eclipsed by Maureen O’Hara’s Marian arriving on the scene. A former singer herself, until “laryngitis” (ie more psychological problems) invalided her out of the game and transformed her into Susan’s manager, Marian is within minutes found hovering over the prone body of Susan, a gun in her hand.
Susan is not dead but mortally injured and Marian readily admits she was trying to kill her. But why? Professional jealousy? And who should represent Marian in court? How about a lawyer who once proposed to Susan, who turned him down? No conflict of interest there.
Farce, one way or another, is what’s going on here, with the wrong people in the wrong situations coming in and out of all the wrong doors at all the wrong times.
A film like this needs a brilliant farceur, and it gets it in the shape of Melvyn Douglas, who plays radio personality, wit and hustler Luke Jordan. He is soon crossing metaphorical swords with Victor Jory’s Brook Matthews, the compromised lawyer, in the film’s best scenes. The two guys go at it as if trying to win a screwball speed contest, while the two women, as if mud wrestling, wrangle over who was exploiting who, and whether either party really understood the nature of the relationship they were in.
The structure is Citizen Kane – much delving into motivation in the pasts of Susan, Marian and Luke, in tight episodic scenes bristling with repartee. Herman Mankiewicz wrote (or co-wrote, call the lawyer) both films and makes this a punchy and intelligent experience. Interestingly, the sleuth is not any of the main characters – and certainly not the actual cop on the case, Detective Fowler (Jay C Flippen). Instead Fowler’s wife (Mary Philip) starts doing the leg work, arriving on the scene as a nobody and increasingly taking on a Miss Marple-esque significance.
This is weird in itself, but then this film is full of weirdness. Is there a lesbian thing going on, I wondered at one point, and, yes, this does come up in courses that teach this sort of thing, a bit of research reveals. Is that what the “woman’s secret” is?
And while we’re about it, why does lawyer Brook have a big portrait of his mother hanging in his room – what is director Nicholas Ray, king of the rogue signal, suggesting here?
Look at it as a coded gay drama if you like but I’d suggest that Mankiewicz and Ray are using all the various signals and suggestions about psychological states as tinsel on the tree, decoration rather than the thing itself. The joke being that if you pull all that decoration off, trying to get at a real “reading”, there’s none to be had. It’s all surfaces. All those simpering men. All that shouting. Those hints of tweedy lesbianism. The repeated appearance of a Luger, campest of all the revolvers. There is a lot of noise here, but remove it and the signal disappears as well.
Enjoy the acting. Grahame is superb as the airhead with a fast mouth and street smarts. She and Ray met on this film and were soon married, which opened up a world of pain for both of them. But on this showing you can see what he saw in her. Though, truth be told, Grahame is outdone by Melvyn Douglas. This is his film.
As a cracking mad farce? Excellent. As anything else? Hmmmm.
A Woman’s Secret – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
