Gloria Grahame actress A Woman’s Secret

D: Nicholas Ray. Maureen O’Hara, Melvyn Douglas, Gloria Grahame, Bill Williams, Victor Jory. Intriguing flashback drama of woman coming to hate singer she built up to success; good performances by two female stars. Just a bit too sloppy. Produced and scripted by Herman J. Mankiewicz, from a Vicki Baum novel. Those attracted to the possibilities of a collaboration between Nicholas Ray and Herman J. Mankiewicz will be disappointed by A Woman’s Secret. Nothing else in the movie lives up to the snap-crackle, tantalizing opening ten minutes, which suggest all kinds of strange goings-on between Maureen O’Hara and Gloria Grahame. The rest of A Woman’s Secret is a whodunnit explanation of what really happened that is conventional and predictable, albeit implausible, and throws cold water on the movie. There is some witty dialogue along the way, the scenes between O’Hara and Grahame (where Ray’s touch is perhaps most apparent) have some sizzle, Grahame somehow remains charming throughout the movie, even though her character is quickly revealed to be fundamentally boring, and A Woman’s Secret may get a few extra points for featuring an unreliable flashback a year before Stage Fright. But one cannot help being struck by Mankiewicz’s decline in the 8 years since you know what.