Programme notes CH 02 — Noir After Dark
The Second Woman
An architect’s luck runs out on schedule, and the woman next door starts keeping count.
Robert Young is an architect whose fiancée died a violent death and whose luck has been failing at regular intervals ever since. Betsy Drake, staying with her aunt along the coast, is a statistician by trade, and she reads his run of accidents the way she would a sample too tidy to be chance. The picture opens like Rebecca, a woman’s voice and a house by the sea, then settles into a case file. The house gives the best performance: his own design, glass and cantilever over the Pacific, nowhere for a man to hide. Watch its long windows at night.
Credits — follow anyone
- Directed by
- James V. Kern
- Photographed by
- Hal Mohr
- With
- Betsy Drake · Florence Bates · Henry O'Neill · Robert Young
Every name is a door — each opens onto everything else that person made in the network.
The thread · every thread
Robert Smith wrote both for independents releasing through United Artists in 1950: one man ruined by small sums, another by small accidents. In each the trouble arrives in instalments, and the suspense is in counting them.