Woman in Hiding is packed full of story. Beginning with Deborah Chandler (Ida Lupino) driving her car off a bridge, director Michael Gordon paces the story briskly and accelerates tension throughout a wide range of settings, including hotels, buses, trains, rivers, and stairwells. After Deborah’s wealthy father dies, she marries the general manager of the family mill, Seldon Clark (Steven McNally), who immediately shows himself as more interested in Deborah’s money than in Deborah. Howard Duff plays Keith Ramsay, a newsstand employee who quits his job to follow Deborah as she escapes her old identity.
Woman in Hiding is one of many noirs of the 1950’s, like
Sudden Fear (1952) and
Night of the Hunter (1955), that seemed to be warning postwar American women that the security of marriage is merely an illusion.
