Between 1949 and 1954, Ida Lupino directed six low-budget features for Filmakers, the production company she founded with her husband Collier Young. They were "problem" films but of a uniquely hard-edged variety-no-hankie melodramas dealing with such subjects as rape, bigamy, unwed motherhood, and mothers living vicariously through their daughters. In The Bigamist, Edmund O'Brien is a salesman whose cool wife (Joan Fontaine) runs the business (freezers) while he travels. He becomes involved with a warm and spunky waitress (Lupino) and, when she has his child, marries her out of a sense of propriety. Thus he embarks on a double life, commuting between two marriages and two classes. The story, told in flashback, unfolds in Lupino's characteristically taut style, its mounting tension exacerbated by her cutting observation of behavioral detail. This tale of two women, polar opposites, while complex, has its own brand of stereotypical assumptions. But as a film about the emotional spread of a middle-aged man, The Bigamist is quite remarkable. Moreover, years before The 400 Blows, The Bigamist defied Hollywood closure by ending on a freeze-frame. The moot point here is not the moral efficacy of adultery or bigamy, but of marriage.