Available on dual-format Blu-Ray/ DVD

Alfred Hitchcock was a thief. Throughout his career he  recycled his own films and borrowed from other people’s.  It’s inconceivable that Woman on the Run was not prey to his magpie tendencies when he was making Vertigo (1958).  It’s all here – the protagonists constantly on the move, the daring plot twist, a rooftop nail-biter, the big set-piece finale…

It’s vertiginous San Francisco at a time when it was still a rough old seaport. Frank Johnson (Ross Elliott) is walking his dog at night when he sees the murder of a witness in an important court case.  Scared of the murderer getting to him too or being dragooned into court and possibly a witness protection programme, Frank abandons the dog and goes on the lam.

His imperiously cynical wife Eleanor (Ann Sheridan), who positively reeks of ennui, cares not a whit where he is – or so she says to the police detective Ferris (Robert Keith).  So hard-as-nails is she that the policeman mumbles: ‘No wonder the world is full of bachelors!’  She is friendlier towards a tabloid reporter Danny (Dennis O’Keefe) who wants a juicy story, maybe with a sex angle, and together they attempt to find the husband and get him his special hypertension medication without which he might die.

For noir fans it’s all here: the tight-lipped dame and tightly-belted trench coats, a wonderfully insistent B-movie score, Dutch tilts, graphic shadows, receding perspectives and hard-boiled cops.

With Frank on the run from the police (or is it is selfish missus?) Eleanor and Danny take a tour d’horizon of San Francisco’s gritty underbelly from the seedy Chinatown cabaret to the mean Irish bar and the dockside navy store (it’s shot almost entirely on location).  The city looks as dangerous and precipitous in the afternoon sunshine as it does at night and there’s a fine grainy quality to the film that’s perfectly in keeping with the movie’s gutsy realism.  Hal Mohr was the director of photography.

Towards the end and in the lee of a noisy bone-rattling rollercoaster where Eleanor and Frank once did their courting she says, ‘It’s more frightening than romantic.’  Reporter Danny, who might be falling for her, replies: ‘That’s how love is when you’re young – and how life is when you’re older.’

Ann Sheridan plays the world-weary, melting ice queen in a way that is totally believable.  Will she reconnect with her husband or abandon him like he did the dog and walk off with the handsome lug Danny? And is Danny all he seems?  Writer-director Norman Foster’s film was almost lost but a collaborative restoration project between UCLA Film and Television Archive and the Film Noir Foundation saved it.  Although this might not be in the A category of noirs, it has plenty to commend it.