This one may be the worst of all Irish's (Cornell Woolrich's) adaptation for the screen.Not because they have transposed the action from California to the vineyards of Bordeaux,but because they totally betrayed the novel.Robin Davis ,a thoroughly faceless director, could not render Irish's doomed atmosphere to the slightest extent.The dialogue is mean,poor,repetitive,Richard Boringer,the villain,is reduced to repeat almost the same lines three times.The conclusion becomes an happy end,forgetting the terrible final lines of the novel,something like:"We've lost.That's all I know.We've lost.And now the game is over." Irish's tragic tale of fatality is turned into a soap opera .Natalie Baye could have been the character,had she found the adequate team. The only comedian on the screen who generates some emotion is veteran Madeleine Robinson.This was a blockbuster in France,but ,alas, almost nobody read the book.Do it,and avoid this bland movie.

NB :A new adaptation ,"Mrs Winterbourne" (1996) ,is worse.The best,by far ,is Mitchell Leisen's "No man of her own" starring Barbara Stanwyck.

"Who are you?" "What do you want?" "Where did you come from?" Most people getting these anonymous notes in the mail would either throw them away or give them to the police. Things are more difficult for Patricia Meyrand, a young widow with a new baby who is living with the family of her dead husband, a family she had not met before the train crash which took his life. Patricia Meyrand is really Helene George (Nathalie Baye). She was eight months pregnant when her heel of a husband threw her out. She bought a train ticket to Bordeaux for no reason except to get away. Just before that train crash she was befriended by Patricia Meyrand, also eight months pregnant, who was traveling with her husband to meet the Meyrand family. When Helene woke up in hospital, she had given birth...and everyone has assumed she was Patricia, and that her husband and "Helen" had been killed. At first she resists and tries to leave, but then she realizes she has no money, no future and a baby to care for. When the Meyrand family accepts her as their son's widow, she thinks she can start a new life.

The Meyrands are wealthy wine makers, with groves of vineyards and a fine château. Mrs. Meyrand is, perhaps, distant at first, but we soon learn she is very ill with little time left to live. Mr. Meyrand is gracious and solicitous. And their remaining son, Pierre (Francis Huster) seems friendly enough. As the weeks pass, however, it is apparent to them that this Patricia amongst the Meyrands seems to have almost no recollection of her own life, or how she met her husband...and this seems strange, especially to Mrs. Meyrand. What may seem stranger still is the evident feelings Pierre is beginning to show toward Patricia. Lust or love? And, of course, there is the question of the ownership of the château and vineyards. One-third is now Patricia's.

We would be inattentive movie goers if, by now, we hadn't realized that the heel of a husband who threw Helen out and whom we haven't seen since is played by the well-known actor Richard Bohringer who received third billing. For the first two-thirds of I Married a Dead Man, we have been watching an engrossing story of a young woman, down on her luck who made some bad choices, but who, in choosing to be Patricia Meyrand, may have made a good choice. She wasn't honest, but she has done no real harm. When her low-life husband appears, however, he is uninterested in her or their baby, only in the money she can give him if he keeps her secret. Now the possibility of murder begins to raise it's bloody eyes. But so does the extent of acceptance and love which Patricia/Helene has given to and received from the Meyrands.

The movie is based on the novel, I Married a Dead Man, by Cornell Woolrich writing as William Irish. Woolrich was a master of that great and unique genre, American pulp crime fiction. So is there a murder? Are you kidding? At least with this movie justice is done, although perhaps not entirely legally. For a Cornell Woolrich story, we wind up with a sunny and satisfying conclusion, even with a body that had to be disposed of.

Here we have a rare genre mix, Thriller and Romance - and I'm not talking about a Thriller with a love interest, or a Romance with a thrilling element. The film is genuinely both.

Nathalie Baye is excellent in the lead as the pregnant woman who survives a train crash and is mistaken for somebody else. She has good reasons to go along with this charade and part of the plot develops delightfully in the While You Were Sleeping mode. Baye's past is coming to haunt her though, giving the film an extra hard edge.

In some sense it's the kind of film US television companies would like to make but always fail.