No Man of Her Own (1950)

Bah Humbug! Thinks my 1940s imaginary screenwriter persona. She is not a lover of Christmas. Christmas filmic tropes are all about the feel-good warmth, twinkling lights, family, the magic of generosity and, even worse, cute children awaiting gifts. Yuk!

The season isn’t lost to her completely. She can do something with New Year’s Eve – heavy drinking, litter and debris, half-lit streets after midnight with guilty footsteps and most importantly, a bucketful of regrets.

It’s just Christmas itself that she struggles with, with all its sweet and sickly goodness. But, Christmas can be used in a Noir. It offers contrast. It offers the hope and the optimism that can be so quickly swept away by intrigue and distrust.

That is what happens in No Man of Her Own.

Let’s start with the title – how chilling a thought for a forties female. This is a film about a woman on the edge, marginalised, alone.

The action starts with strained domesticity. A mother with a baby. A man sweeping back his hair in anxious moves. A knock on the door. The police are announced. And the action moves to flashback.

We move from comfortable affluence to see the mother climbing the stairwell of a grubby rooming house. Light drained from her face. The heaviness of pregnancy hinted at by the drape of her coat. An impassioned knocking against an apartment door. Desperation is written into every move.

Yes, No Man of her Own, has all the requirements of a Noir drama.

The premise is simple. A pregnant desperate women, Helen, abandoned by her unfaithful boyfriend Steven, has nothing but a train ticket to San Francisco. On the train she is befriended by a lovely couple, also expecting a child. The train crashes, killing the newly-married couple and leaving Helen with a new identity – Patricia Harkness – as she wakes in a private room of a hospital. She is taken in by the family, under the assumption that her son is their grandchild.

So, all the ingredients of a film noir are set up in the first twenty minutes – a ‘fallen’ woman, deceit, mystery, fear and suspicion.

And what does this have to do with Christmas?

The action takes place over the winter and the cold snow contrasts with the warmth of family life. Especially when Steven tracks down Helen and begins his attempt to blackmail her.

Most of the action takes place away from the comfort of the home with its decorated tree and luxurious expanse. Instead it takes place on stairwells, or grubby backstreets and offices that double as bedsits. There is a car chase, with the snow as aggravating feature. Noir requires murkiness, not well-lit drawing rooms.

So, middle-class Christmas serves primarily as contrast to the real world of crime and fear. But it does more than that, especially through the use of Stanwyck and her skilful depiction of outsider, unwitting manipulator, deceiver, the person on the margin, desperate to belong.

No Man of Her Own shows a Christmas many of use may recognise. It depicts that needling awkwardness of being around people who love you, but don’t understand you. Of being on edge, needing to say the right thing, not understanding all the rituals, not understanding the rules of the games, having a different memory to those sitting around a table.

Christmas can be about Santa Claus and magic and finding hope again, à la the Hallmark menu. But good writing might suggest that it is more often about awkwardness, keeping ourselves under wraps, restrained and polite, fraying at the edges. Stanwyck is so good at that. At playing with the boundaries of respectability, a natural wariness of good people, repressed fear at being found out. And the occasional “Stanwyck Scene”, the burst of emotions, the stillness giving way to the banging of fists into a door or a masculine chest.

And so as a 1940s screenwriter, I sit back in my office chair, take a deep drag on my cigarette and try to get honest about the black magic of Christmas.

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