Word: mankiewicz
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Woman's Secret (RKO Radio) might better have been kept under lock & key. Producer Herman J. Mankiewicz, a veteran scripter who should have known setter, scraped this one right off the bottom of Vicki Baum's rhinestone-studded jarrel of slick fiction...
...three young matrons in station-wagon suburbia learn that one of their husbands has run off with a feared and envied local charmer. Leaving the runaway husband's identity dangling (neither the wives nor the audience is in on the secret at first), Writer-Director Joseph L. Mankiewicz explores each wife's marital security in three long flashbacks. Then, with considerable skill and a sort of hard-bitten humor, he pulls off an ending that is adroit but fair, surprising but credible, and warm yet not sticky with sentiment...
...Mankiewicz has wisely grouped his three episodes so that the film gets better as it goes along. The first sequence, which is the only one to suffer from glossy traces of the story's slick-magazine origin, catches an ex-farm girl (Jeanne Crain) in a panic of social inferiority to her husband (Jeffrey Lynn) and his friends...
...suggested that Peck virtually never goes out evenings because he is terrified at the possibility of running into some of the community's better-known Bright Boys. "I am short of the old I-am," he explains. "When I get mixed up with Nunnally Johnson or Herman Mankiewicz or Ben Hecht, I am struck dumb. I feel more comfortable in front of a camera." Actually, the very sound brain in his head doesn't run either to wit or to highbrow intellectual discussion. Alfred Hitchcock has said of him that he is probably the most anecdoteless...
Thanks to the practiced hand of Hollywood Oldtimer Joe Mankiewicz, who directed and co-authored the screen play, Somewhere in the Night is a taut, tidy package of suspense. But what 20th Century-Fox publicists are excited about is screen newcomer Nancy Guild, who looks, talks and acts a bit too much like the same studio's Gene Tierney for her own good. Nancy was a University of Arizona coed until LIFE recently printed some photographs of her modeling college-girl fashions. Darryl Zanuck took one look, issued the necessary ringing proclamation; a new leading lady was born...