Woman in Hiding
Directed by Michael GordonWhen Deborah Chandler inherits control of her father's mill in a small Southern town, she finds herself married almost immediately to Selden Clark, a charming and calculating man who has spent years positioning himself to take that inheritance for his own. On their wedding night, Selden engineers what is meant to look like an accident – Deborah's car sent over an embankment into a flooding river. She survives. Knowing that no one will believe her, and that Selden's social standing gives him a considerable advantage, she chooses to disappear rather than surface and be killed in a second, more careful attempt.
Living under a false name and working a succession of menial jobs, Deborah crosses paths with Keith Ramsey, a good-natured traveling salesman who stumbles into her predicament and gradually comes to believe her account of events. His involvement complicates her isolation: trust, for a woman in her position, is itself a form of exposure. Meanwhile Selden, projecting the image of a grieving widower, methodically searches for her, and the machinery of small-town respectability continues to operate in his favor.
Woman in Hiding belongs to a strand of postwar noir organized around female flight rather than female fatality – films in which the woman at the center is not destroyed by her desire but endangered by someone else's greed. The suspense turns less on investigation than on endurance, and the film's moral weight rests on what it costs a woman to be disbelieved by the institutions that are supposed to protect her.
