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The curse begins when the mirror cracks. Or at least that’s how it seems in hindsight in No Man of Her Own (1950). Before we’ve gotten to that point, Helen (Barbara Stanwyck) has already been put through hell, and we’ve only known her about 15 minutes. She’s eight months pregnant and financially destitute. Her boyfriend, Stephen (Lyle Bettger), has recently left her for a younger woman, and when Helen attempts early in the film to confront them at his apartment, he refuses to answer the door. He does, though, slip a train ticket and some cash under the door; that’s what leads Helen to that cracked mirror. After boarding, young newlyweds Patrice and Hugh (Phyllis Thaxter and Richard Denning) notice a visibly worn-out Helen struggling; Hugh offers her his seat, and Patrice, who too is pregnant, some temporary friendship. This affable young couple is en route to a milestone: Patrice is meeting Hugh’s family, none of whom have met her before, for the first time. This couple is so infectiously jittery with excitement that you feel like you’ve been punched in the gut when, while Helen and Patrice are in the powder room a few moments later, the train crashes. Patrice and Hugh are killed. Helen is left so battered that, when she’s driven to the hospital, doctors have to perform an emergency C-section. 

When they were trading their final words, Patrice had Helen try on, for a laugh, her wedding ring, and it was just when Helen was admiring how it looked on her finger in the bathroom mirror that the room went spinning. The ring is what gets us to what No Man of Her Own is really about. This is the story of mistaken identity, and how far that mistake can be stretched out before there’s another catastrophe that rivals the original lie. 

The hospital thinks Helen is actually Patrice. That leads Helen, grudgingly — she openly weeps over Patrice’s and Hugh’s deaths — to do something unthinkably bold: head to Hugh’s family home, pretending she’s Patrice, and reap the benefits of a new life as a widow who’s married into a financially comfortable family. The movie, written by Sally Benson and Catherine Turney, isn’t the kind to even consider framing Helen as cynically opportunistic. Voiceover, for one thing, lets us know that “it isn’t too late; I can still back out” is playing on a loop in her head on the ride over as if her brain were doing the equivalent of rocking nervously back and forth in a chair. She’s second-guessing just before she’s greeting her faux parents-in-law and still afterward. Helen is just so feverish with desperation — how couldn’t she be, living in a society she knows would prefer she be dead over unwed and a mother — that she’s, more than anything, just drawn to the idea of landing somewhere not having to worry about what will become of her and her baby’s tomorrow. As played by Stanwyck, whose performance during the first part of the movie especially is like watching a profusely bleeding open wound emote, we can only see Helen’s irrationality as rational. 

Barbara Stanwyck and Lyle Bettger in No Man of Her Own.

You naturally worry, like Helen does, about the family getting hip to what’s really going on. But they’re just so happy not to have lost their new daughter-in-law, too, that even when she doesn’t know things Patrice definitely would — like where she grew up and what Hugh’s favorite song was — everybody chalks it up to simply memory problems related to the crash. And Helen may have a love interest in Hugh’s older brother Bill (John Lund): a surprise, since his pencil-thin mustache initially betrays a greasiness. (You’re certain he’ll be the one to start causing problems.) In No Man of Her Own, the real problem will actually be Stephen, who reemerges after he figures out what’s going on. (That started when he was invited to ID Helen’s body at the morgue and noticed the obvious.) He wants to take advantage of the wealth of Helen’s new family, so he starts blackmailing her. 

It’s inevitable we get to a destination like this. Movies where someone puts on a false identity and unwisely hopes for the best always take us there or somewhere close. It’s part of the territory. Benson and Turney tend with workmanlike efficiency to the soap-operatic complications expected of them. There will be murder; there will be cover-ups. And they get the job done. But where No Man of Her Own is the most audacious isn’t what sticks with us. It’s all the stuff before it, where we’re mostly just sitting in Helen’s pain — the grief of a family who is still so stunned by what happened that they don’t seem, for most of the movie, to have quite comprehended the tragedy. 

It’s impossible to stop thinking of Patrice and Hugh. Benson and Turney don’t let them whittle away into little more than the foundation for a complicated plot. Thaxter and Denning perfectly calibrate their performances with the right amount of moon-eyed eagerness; Thaxter delivers her lines at the rapid clip that makes it clear just how excited she is to tell you about where her life is headed. You can’t forget it. 

No Man of Her Own is as good as it is — at least before it fulfills its melodramatic obligations — because its writers, because director Mitchell Leisen (who made melodramas regularly but never really tapped into his thriller instincts) gives this all maybe more emotional legitimacy than it needs. They treat material that could become in other hands silly seriously.