Cheap A Woman's Secret (Video) (Maureen O'Hara, Melvyn Douglas) (Nicholas Ray) Price

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The perils of vicarious living
Obscure but excellent and gripping melodrama--not surprising, since it was scripted by renowned "Citizen Kane" screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz. Maureen O'Hara looks exquisite as usual, but it is her intelligent and perceptive performance that rivets the audience in the role of Marian Washburn, an accomplished aspiring singer who becomes a successful agent when her vocal chords tragically give out just as she was on the brink of stardom. Savvy Marian is nothing if not resourceful and in her determination to remain in the arena she loves so much, she uses her ambition and knowledge of the singing field to propel another singer toward fame. Sultry Gloria Grahame plays the beauteous but bubblebrained Susan Caldwell, an aspiring singer with a lovely voice who becomes Marian's protegee under the appropriately silly but catchy stagename Estrellita. Personality and priority-wise, the smart, professional and work/career-obsessed Marian and dense, fun-loving, man-crazy Susan are polar opposites, but both realize they need one another to be successful. Under Marian's tutelage Susan not only refines her voice, but her coarse manners as well, which she obviously needs to gt rid of to successfully navigate in high-society waters. In the dramatic opening sequence Marian is arrested for shooting Susan and surprisingly confesses to the crime, but her piano-playing pal Luke Jordan (Melvyn Douglas) and the police are skeptical and do some investigating of their own to clear her. In the prismatic flashback method he utilized so effectively in "Citizen Kane," Mankiewicz details the events leading up to this situation as well as fascinatingly focusing on the increasingly fractured relationship between these two very different women thrust together by circumstance and necessity. Making this something of a cautionary tale is the strong underlying theme of the unhealthiness and destructiveness of vicariously living one's life through others.