Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		3.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		3.0
Overall		3.5

Woman on the Run Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman June 13, 2016

Have you heard of Norman Foster? Unless you’re a fan of detective B-movie franchise entries like Charlie Chan at Treasure Island or Mysterious Mr. Moto, chances are you might need to be nudged a bit to come up with other credits of this journeyman director. Foster had a long if underappreciated and perhaps perceived as being less than distinguished career, something that the range of Foster’s directorial efforts tends to put the lie to. There are a number of well done offerings completed under Foster’s directorial aegis, including Journey Into Fear, a 1943 Mercury Theater presentation with Orson Welles that is so stylish it’s long been insisted that Welles at least helped with directing, if not did it all outright himself (something that Welles was on the record as forcefully denying). Woman on the Run is a really interesting 1950 quasi-noir that nonetheless lacks several of noir’s most defining tropes. There’s no sultry blonde femme fatale leading some poor hapless shlub to his imminent demise, nor is there even some kind of nefarious plot that ties morally ambivalent characters together. Instead, a probably none too happily married couple deals with the after effects of the husband having witnessed a murder, with a kind of self imposed witness protection program leading to a cascading series of events, many of which tend to reflect on the unhappy marriage than any real perceived threat from without. Woman on the Run may not rise to absolute classic status, but it’s a fascinating film and one that manages to evoke a noir ambience without indulging in what were even by 1950 already tried and true gambits of the still fledgling genre.

While Woman on the Run is itself rather fascinating from any number of standpoints, some of the most interesting information is actually backstage data, something this Arrow Academy release doles out in typically compelling fashion. The film’s heroine, Eleanor Johnson, is portrayed by erstwhile pinup girl Ann Sheridan, one of those actresses who amassed a rather incredible list of credits but who wasn’t able to sustain her position atop the Hollywood hierarchy and who by 1950 was struggling to find work, or at least work she wanted to do. As the commentary and other supplements included on this disc detail, Sheridan was kind of a prime mover in Woman on the Run’s development, and she may in fact have been responsible for the hiring of Norman Foster as director.

Sheridan was, as with so many actresses of Hollywood’s Golden Age, not just beautiful, but whip smart, and evidently with a mouth and temperament to match. All of those tendencies inform her performance as Eleanor, a kind of jaundiced supposed housewife whose marriage has turned out be anything but “happily ever after”. Sheridan’s worldly ennui suffuses Woman on the Run with a really interesting emotional subtext. This is not a femme fatale in any traditional sense, and Eleanor’s plight in trying to track down her missing husband and solve the mystery of the killing he’s witnessed doesn’t really fall into typical noir territory. But the film’s mood is decidedly dark and slightly askew, with Foster and cinematographer Hal Mohr offering both chiaroscuro in abundance, as well as an almost febrile camera that dollies and tracks incessantly, but never to the point that diffuses attention.

Eleanor’s husband is a guy named Frank (Ross Elliott) who is seen walking a dog in the film’s opening moments. Quite by chance he witnesses a man meeting his fate at the hands of an unseen assailant, a murderer who then takes a couple of potshots at Frank, missing his target. When the cops (including a wonderful Robert Keith as Inspector Ferris) show up to question Frank, the unsettled nature of the Johnsons’ marriage is alluded to. There are some narrative hiccups that the screenplay engages in to properly set up Frank’s need to disappear, something that might have potentially scuttled the film’s dramatic momentum, but for those willing to cut the film some slack in this regard, once Frank has disappeared, the story takes off in a mostly satisfying way.

It’s at this point that Eleanor gets involved, when Ferris goes to question her about her husband. Though the marriage is evidently on the rocks, there’s some semblance of affection still existing between the two, and Eleanor, accompanied by a reporter named Leggett (Dennis O’Keefe) who’s on the hunt for a scoop, start trying to track down the whereabouts of the missing witness. Frank in the meantime has managed to leave Eleanor a series of cryptic clues to his whereabouts, making much of Woman on the Run play like a kind of supercharged scavenger hunt.

The film’s big “twist” is probably going to be more apparent to contemporary audiences raised on the ability to “spot the killer” in a relatively small cast, and Woman on the Run perhaps spills its veritable beans just a bit too early for the reveal to really shock. But Foster stages a fantastic climax aboard a roller coaster in a sequence that easily could have been lifted from one of Alfred Hitchcock’s iconic set pieces. Sheridan and O’Keefe make for a nicely bantering quasi-couple, and the film has a palpable ambience of seediness and maybe even just the hint of despair.

Woman on the Run Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Woman on the Run is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Arrow Academy with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.35:1. Arrow's typically informative booklet gets into the provenance of the elements, which in this case was a dupe negative held by the British Film Institute. Audio needed to be sourced separately for a variety of reasons (some of the supplementary material gets into this in detail), and Eddie Muller's probably illegal subterfuge (also detailed in the supplements) probably helped to salvage that side of things, since the only known American print was destroyed in the 2008 Universal fire (the booklet incorrectly states the date as 2007). This transfer has issues which the restoration hasn't completely ameliorated, though the 2K scan struck from a new fine grain master positive has a lot going for it, especially when one considers the lack of primary source material. There's still quite a bit of damage to be seen here, including minus density, flecks (both black and white) and outright mars to the image, including scratches and the like. Some of the roughhewn appearance and problematic contrast can be traced almost entirely to the source. That said, detail is often quite good, to the point that (to cite just one example) little flyaway threads on the tweed coat Sheridan wears for most of the film can easily be spotted. Some of the darkest scenes suffer from near crush, something that I am also attributing to the secondary source material. Grain is fairly heavy but resolves naturally and engenders no compression anomalies. I'd probably score this closer to 3.25 if I were able to, but wanted to differentiate the more homogeneous appearance of this release from the simultaneously released Too Late for Tears (review forthcoming), which has a considerably more heterogeneous look due to differing source elements.

Woman on the Run Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Eddie Muller's sneaky duplicating efforts managed to rescue this film's soundtrack, and while the LPCM Mono iteration is not going to win any awards from audiophiles, it's considerably less damaged than the video presentation, and offers a decent amount of depth within generally narrow confines. The film is built largely out of dialogue, and expected boxiness tends to come into play mostly in moments like the credits sequence with the florid orchestral underscore. A few sound effects don't quite resonate with a lot of impact, but generally speaking there's little to complain about here, if similarly little to write home about.

Woman on the Run Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Audio Commentary features "noirchaeologist" Eddie Muller.


• Love is a Rollercoaster: Woman on the Run Revisited (1080p; 16:50) is a well done retrospective which also features Muller.


• A Wild Ride: Restoring Woman on the Run (1080p; 5:08) is an interesting look at the challenges faced by the restorers of this title.


• Woman on the Run Locations Then and Now (1080i; 6:59) is a fun tour around San Francisco.


• Noir City (1080p; 9:51) is about the annual San Francisco noir film festival. I wonder how Chris Hardwick is going to feel about the production company logo which features his future mother-in-law Patty Hearst in her guise as SLA's "Tania", albeit with something other than a machine gun in her hands.

Arrow's insert booklet also includes a good essay by Muller.

Woman on the Run Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Woman on the Run is a rather intriguing little film, but for cineastes the behind the scenes information (including about the film's history after its release) is probably going to be just as intriguing as anything within the film itself. Arrow has done a typically excellent job, and the Film Noir Foundation's restoration, while not completely able to overcome deficiencies in the source material, is commendable. Recommended.