Second Woman
Directed by James V. KernJeff Cohalan, an architect still hollowed out by the death of his fiancée, retreats to a small California coastal town to rebuild his practice and, with less certainty, his life. There he meets Ellen Foster, a quietly observant young woman who rents space in a house belonging to her sharp-tongued aunt Amelia. Ellen is drawn to Jeff despite – or perhaps because of – the damage she recognizes in him. From the outset the film establishes two registers: the sunlit domestic surface of postwar small-town life, and the darker current running beneath it, embodied in Jeff's inexplicable episodes of memory loss and his growing suspicion that someone is engineering his ruin.
Those suspicions acquire form when Jeff's professional projects begin to collapse under circumstances he cannot explain – structural failures, missing funds, sabotaged relationships. The presence of Keith Ferris, a sleek and proprietary figure from the town's social establishment, complicates matters considerably, as does the intervention of Dr. Raymond Hartley, whose psychiatric counsel Jeff accepts with reluctant desperation. Ellen's loyalty is tested as the evidence against Jeff accumulates and the people around her begin to treat her affection for him as a symptom of poor judgment. The film uses the mechanics of the noir frame-up to explore how thoroughly a reputation, and a man, can be dismantled by patient, invisible malice.
Second Woman belongs to the strand of postwar noir concerned less with criminal milieu than with psychological erosion – films in which the protagonist's greatest antagonist is his own fractured perception of events. The mystery of who is destroying Jeff Cohalan, and why, is less important finally than the question of whether a man this far gone can still be believed, by others or by himself.
