Based on Cornell Woolrich's I Married a Dead Man, this has all the trappings of a film noir (uncertain identities, murder, forbidden desire), but the film's use of voice cuts through noir convention to underscore an address to women in postwar America. Barbara Stanwyck, pregnant and deserted, on a track to nowhere, is mistaken for another pregnant woman who is killed in a train wreck. Desperate, confused, she impersonates the woman for the sake of her newborn, living with the wealthy in-laws whose newlywed son also died in the crash. In their tranquil villa, her voice reveals, “it's a pleasant life . . . but not for us, not for us.” The narration of the story in flashback underscores its fatalism, and its pulp mystery roots, but it also draws us deeply into this character's subjective consciousness, with its poetical, highly personal and affective speech, underwritten by a subjective camera that lingers with longing on the home she wishes were hers.