Woman on the Run [Blu-ray/DVD] [2 Discs]

Director: Norman Foster Norman Foster

Overview

Though it is Ross Elliot who witnesses a gangland rubout in Woman on the Run, the film is told from the point of view of Elliot's wife, played by Anne Sheridan. When Elliot goes into hiding, the police approach Sheridan and ask her aid in locating her husband. She is reluctant at first, since hers is a marriage in name only, but her conscience is aroused when she learns that Elliot is suffering from a potentially fatal heart ailment. Reporter Dennis O'Keefe offers to go along with Anne in her search for Elliot. He's a real friendly reporter. Real, real friendly, and helpful, too. So guess who the "hit man" hired to by the mob to kill Elliot turns out to be?

Product Details

Release Date:	05/17/2016
UPC:	0617311679797
Original Release:	1950
Source:	Flicker Alley
Region Code:	A
Sound:	[Dolby Digital Mono, Dolby Digital Stereo]
Language:	English
Time:	1:19:00
Sales rank:	23,769

Special Features

Audio commentary track - by author, cinema historian, and "noirchaelogist" Eddie Muller.; "Love is a Rollercoaster: Woman on the Run Revisited" - produced by Steven Smith and the Film Noir Foundation, this mini-doc offers a look into the making of the film, from script to noir classic.; "A Wild Ride: Restoring Woman on the Run" - produced by Steven Smith and the Film Noir Foundation, this stranger-than-fiction account of the film's resotration is a thriller in itself.; "Woman on the Run Locations Then and Now" - city sleuth (aka Brian Hollins) leads a virtual toaur around San Francisco hunting down the many locations used during the production of Woman on the Run.; "NOIR CITY" - a short documentary directed by Joe Talbot about the annual NOIR CITY film festival presented by the Film Noir Foundation at San Francisco's historic Castro Theatre.

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Ann Sheridan	Eleanor Johnson
Dennis O'Keefe	Danny Leggett
Robert Keith	Inspector Ferris
Ross Elliott	Frank Johnson
Frank Jenks	Detective Shaw
John Qualen	Mailbus
J. Farrell MacDonald	Sea Captain
Tom Dillon	Joe Gordon
Joan Shawlee	Blonde
Steven Geray	Dr. Hohler
Reiko Sato	Suzie
Victor Sen Yung	Sammy
Thomas P. Dillon	Joe Gordon
Emil Newman	Composer
Art Lange	Composer

Technical Credits

Norman Foster

Alan Campbell

Norman Foster	Director,Screenwriter,Screenwriter
Howard Welsch	Producer
Alan Campbell	Screenwriter

Editorial Reviews

Norman Foster is best remembered for his directorial credit on a string of Mr. Moto movies in the late '30s; for Journey Into Fear (1942), a film prepared and designed by Orson Welles, on which Foster merely had to (and did) follow all of Welles' detailed instructions to bring off properly; and for a bunch of Disney-produced TV projects in the 1950s. But Woman on the Run (1950) is Foster's masterpiece, a stylish, sometimes funny, always ominous and often unsettling work that has as much to say about marriage and unhappiness as it offers thrills and suspense; and in the bargain, it offers Ann Sheridan in perhaps the best role of her career, as a hardened, disillusioned woman who discovers that at least half of the problems in her life lay within herself, and that she still loves the man she thought had ruined her life. It also us gives some of the best location shooting around San Francisco (albeit in black-and-white) that audiences were to get prior to Hitchcock's Vertigo and Don Siegel's Dirty Harry (not to mention Siegel's The Lineup). Foster and his cast perform a beautiful balancing act throughout, offering scenes laced with irony and biting humor (often at the expense of Sheridan's character) while never losing sight of the notion that we're following the trail of someone who is not only in danger from a killer, but who may also be a dying man, if he doesn't stop running. The moments of humor, sly, sardonic, and understated, relieve the tension at strategic points, which helps make the overall tone of suspense that much more effective and compelling. In all, it's some of the best work ever done by most of the people involved, and that rare thriller peopled by characters that one feels good about having learned to know better from the beginning to the end.