In The Bigamist, Edmond O'Brien is a salesman whose icy 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 embarking 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. Presenting the two women as polar opposites (or perhaps two sides of one woman?) is both engaging and problematic; but as a film about the emotional spread of a middle-aged man, The Bigamist is really quite remarkable, and, years before The 400 Blows, defies Hollywood closure by ending on a freeze frame. The moot point here is not the moral efficacy of adultery or bigamy, but of marriage.