Maverick filmmaker Edgar G. Ulmer was a tireless creative contributor at the tiny Poverty Row studio Producers' Releasing Corporation (PRC), directing scores of modestly budgeted movies and helping to make many more. At war's end PRC invested in some slightly more expensive productions, including this foray into the glossy 'women's picture'. Ulmer constructed elaborate sets for the French Quarter of New Orleans, and the perfectionist cameraman Franz Planer gave Secret the visual sheen of a much bigger production. During Mardi Gras celebrations, New Orleans girl Toni (Nancy Coleman) becomes pregnant by departing soldier Dick (Philip Reed). When his letter committing himself to their relationship is lost, she gives up on him. In New York, the desperate Toni pacts with her married sister Renee (Margaret Lindsay), who cannot have a child: they switch identities and travel to a New Mexico spa for the delivery. On the books the child is Renee's, a ruse that Renee, her husband and Toni uphold back in New York. But three years later Toni cannot resist seeing her baby once more. Catching glimpses in the park, Toni becomes determined to steal him back. Leading player Nancy Coleman had played memorable disturbed women in Kings Row and Edge of Darkness, and thus brings an edge of desperation to Toni's manic desire to reclaim her child. The war definitely loosened some restrictions on movie subject matter. The Production Code had quashed an earlier attempt to film Secret, but Paramount's Olivia de Havilland weepie To Each His Own (1946) is a similar tale of a birth mother who loses her child to foster parents. The Code Office criticized the absence of a moral spokesperson in PRC's script: no character rises to judge Toni's actions. The censors also specifically requested the removal of one item, a doll that Toni carries in a box in one scene. Yet the symbolic baby remains a part of the film. Critics liked the film's New Orleans sequences, while audiences were impressed by a finale that introduced a feeling of psychological menace to a tale of a woman's emotions.

By Glenn Erickson