Cinema: The New Pictures, Feb. 19, 1951

The Second Woman (Harry Popkin; United Artists) improves on the old Hollywood custom of modeling a movie after a hit. The picture apes not one model but at least three. Its title trades on The Third Man, while most of its twists come straight out of Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca and Spellbound.

Moody music and the creepy offscreen voice of Heroine Betsy Drake introduce shots of a house's charred ruins in a rugged setting on the California coast. Flashbacks tell the story of its brooding onetime occupant, Architect Robert Young, who has permitted no one inside since the accidental death of his wife...

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