No Man's Woman Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		3.0
Audio		3.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		2.0

No Man's Woman Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman March 18, 2016

There may be no big showdown with a portly Raymond Burr cornering a suspect in a courtroom, along with the requisite confession delivered right from the witness stand, but in many ways the 1955 potboiler No Man’s Woman plays very much like a standard episode of Perry Mason. A number of interconnected people are introduced, including estranged husband and wife Harlow Grant (John Archer, perhaps only coincidentally a frequent guest star on Perry Mason) and Carolyn Ellenson Grant (Marie Windsor, herself an alumna of the Burr series). Harlow wants a divorce from the scheming harridan Carolyn, but Carolyn wants a rather large cash settlement which Harlow isn’t willing to cough up. Harlow is involved with a new woman named Louise Nelson (Nancy Gates), while Carolyn is hanging out with an officious art critic named Wayne Vincent (Patric Knowles), a guy who is supposedly helping Louise with her art gallery business (though one assumes there’s “help” of another kind going on as well), not to mention a younger buck whom Carolyn accompanies on his boat.

The first half hour or so of this relatively short film (it clocks in at around 70 minutes) details the various interrelationships at play, at which point Carolyn gets up in the middle of the night when she hears someone rummaging downstairs and then delivers one of those “no, no!” moments directly to the camera as gunfire erupts and the dastardly damsel meets her gruesome fate. The rest of the film follows the industrious but (of course) flat footed policemen who segue from suspect to suspect until the not all that surprising denouement is offered in the closing moments. This programmer is nothing special but might suffice to divert attention until the next Perry Mason rerun is available.

No Man's Woman Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

No Man's Woman is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Olive Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.67:1. Culled from the Republic catalog, this is a watchable but generally unimpressive looking transfer, once that has a certain unevenness at times in terms of contrast, black levels and especially grain structure. Opticals like dissolves often look fairly ragged and there is quite a bit of age related wear and tear. That said, when things settle down they look at least relatively good and organic, with decent detail levels and well modulated gray scale.

No Man's Woman Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

No Man's Woman features an okay but somewhat muffled sounding DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track that offers dialogue rendered well enough, but which fails to muster much energy for either effects or (especially) the score. The mid- to high end is especially tamped down sounding, something that tends to be more noticeable during the opening credits music and similar moments.

No Man's Woman Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

This is a typical bare bones Olive release with no supplements and only two choices on the main menu itself (for Play and Chapters).

No Man's Woman Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Though the film tries mightily to divert attention to a few suspects at the fringes of the story (fringes that are frankly there only to provide a few extra suspects), armchair sleuths are going to have this "mystery" figured out probably even before the victim meets her fate. Fans of the B- movie cast may get a momentary kick out of this, and for them technical merits are okay but hardly reference level.