I’m in mock mourning: Noir Alley is on hiatus until March 16th. That’s why I’m featuring the last, uh, feature film to be featured by the Noir Czar until his return to TCM.

Woman In Hiding is a nifty 1950 film noir with a fine cast and story; even better, it stars the great Ida Lupino. Ida’s career was in transition as she went from glamorous roles in films such as The Man I Love and  Road House to directing her own decidedly unglamorous indy movies such as The Hitch-Hiker and The Bigamist.

Woman In Hiding is a hybrid of a road movie and your basic “bad husband wants his wealthy wife dead” film. You can guess who plays the heiress. Stephen McNally plays the bad husband who blows up the marriage in its early days by choking his mistress played by Peggy Dow in front of his new wife. Ida Lupino don’t play that and she runs away. You can see why:

That’s one of several excellent set pieces in the movie. It’s Ida being terrorized at the mill McNally wants to steal from her by means of murder most foul.

There are many cool twists and turns to the plot, which I’m not revealing because this feature is called pulp fiction, not pulp spoilers.

Ida and future real life husband Howard Duff have a meet cute at a bus station in Raleigh, NC. Eddie Muller’s intro and outro focus on that so all I’ll do is post this picture of Ida and Howard along with Irving Bacon who was also a pretty darn good director:

Woman In Hiding was directed by Michael Gordon but it’s William H. Daniels’ cinematography that makes it film noir. Dig this still wherein Peggy Dow menaces Lupino with McNally lurking in the background:

How noir is that?

Grading Time: Woman In Hiding is a neglected classic. I give it 3 1/2 stars and an Adrastos Grade of B+

Let’s get back to the roots of this feature and ponder the posters. They’re all quads this time around.

Three exclamation points? Are you fucking kidding me? It’s enough to drive me to the lobby for a caffeine and sugar high:

The lobby cards for Woman In Hiding are plentiful and in living color for this black and white movie. Oy just oy.

You can feel the crackling chemistry between Howard and Ida in the first lobby card.

We have something unusual before moving on to the video portion of the post. A photomontage of images from Woman In Hiding:

Woman In Hiding is such a neglected classic that there isn’t a trailer online. How trashy is that?

The last word goes to Eddie Muller’s Noir Alley intro and outro: