Programme notes CH 02 — Noir After Dark
The Bigamist
A travelling salesman keeps two homes, two wives and one lie, and the adoption agency wants to see both.
Ida Lupino directs, and casts herself as the second wife: a waitress in Los Angeles, lonely enough to take a married man at his word. Edmond O'Brien is the husband, not a villain but a tired man who could not choose, and the film refuses to let anyone hate him cleanly. Joan Fontaine is the first wife in San Francisco, all good management and empty rooms. Watch the Beverly Hills bus tour: the guide points out Edmund Gwenn's house, and Gwenn is the adoption investigator already on the husband's trail. Noir without a gun, where the trap is a filing cabinet.
Credits — follow anyone
- Directed by
- Ida Lupino
- Photographed by
- George E. Diskant
- With
- Joan Fontaine · Edmond O'Brien · Ida Lupino · Jane Darwell · Edmund Gwenn · Bess Flowers
Every name is a door — each opens onto everything else that person made in the network.
The thread · every thread
The same year, the same company, the same star. Lupino made both for The Filmakers in 1953 with Edmond O'Brien: one a road with two hostages and no women, the other two kitchens and no gun. Her two ways of trapping a man.