Edgar G. Ulmer's Her Sister's Secret

Edgar G. Ulmer's Her Sister's Secret (1946) was one of Ulmer's bigger-budgeted films for poverty row studio PRC.  It is, for Ulmer, an unusual soap opera, sometimes called a "weepie," a genre in which fellow émigré Douglas Sirk excelled.  Sirk's films are filled with irony and low-key satire, while Ulmer's film is passionate and moving.  In the beginning there is a beautifully photographed (by Fritz Planer, who also did Max Ophuls' Letter From an Unknown Woman,1948) Mardi Gras scene when Dick (played by Phillip Reed) and Toni (played by Nancy Coleman) first meet, are immediately attracted, and go for a ride.  At midnight Dick removes Toni's mask, a scene more erotic than most of today's scenes of complete nudity, and the sky goes slowly from starlight to sunlight. They plan to meet six weeks later at the same café (a plot device originally used in Leo McCarey's Love Affair,1939) and Dick never shows up, his letter used for scrap paper in the café.  Toni finds out she is pregnant and gives her son to her sister, promising not to see him for three years.  But she can't stay away and almost kidnaps the boy at the same time Dick returns from the war, looking for her.

Ulmer, an outsider all his life, shows great sympathy for Toni and her dilemma, a dilemma not usually shown in films of this period.  There are certain similarities to Preston Sturges's The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944), though even in that film the mother was not unwed, she just could not find her husband or remember his name.  Her Sister's Secret (nice title, since the sisters share the secret) is full of outsiders who are friends to Toni:  her widower father, whose friends are his books; the maid Mathilda, for whom Toni is her only family; Pepe, the owner of the café where Toni and Dick met, and even the foreigner feeding pigeons in the park, who complains to Toni that the birds expect him to be punctual.

There is fatalism here, as there is in all of Ulmer's films, but there is less resignation than in Ulmer's bleaker films, such as Detour (1945); the attitude is closer to a short-lived post-war optimism.  As Toni's father says, "There is nothing you should regret in life, except not having lived it."