The Second Woman

In The Second Woman, directed by the relatively unknown James Kern, architect Jeff Cohalan (Robert Young) experiences an escalating streak of bad luck: possessions go missing, plants die, and pets ingest poison on the grounds of his mansion called Hilltop, which sits on the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea in memory of his fiancée, who died a year earlier under mysterious circumstances. When Cohalan’s next door neighbor’s niece, Ellen Foster (Betsy Drake), begins spending time with him and falling in love, she concludes that either Jeff has grown dangerously paranoiac or someone is systematically trying to destroy his life. The home atop a cliff, the pounding waves, the claw-shaped trees in silhouette, and the “woman in love with mysterious man who might be dangerous” premise make this an outstanding example of Gothic noir. (Its musical soundtrack uses pieces by Tchaikovsky.) While some of the acting is flat, the story is clever and suspenseful; in fact, the film can’t escape comparisons to Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) a decade earlier, a comparison Kern must have been courting in the film’s opening voice-over narration in which Ellen wistfully recalls Hilltop just as Joan Fontaine recalled Manderley.