WOMAN OBSESSED isn’t: the sensationalistic title declares her so because someone at 20th Century Fox decided that it made a snappier snag on marquees and ads than “The Snow Birch”, the name of John Mantley’s novel that Sidney Boehm wrote his script off of. Maybe savvy director Henry Hathaway made the call, or perhaps it issued from image-conscious leading lady Susan Hayward. At any rate, the hook wasn’t enough to nudge the family-discord drama higher than 74th place on the money roster from 1959.

Northwest Canada. After a forest fire claims her husband, ‘Mary Sharron’ (Hayward, 42) has to handle their farm and spirited young son ‘Robbie’. Help arrives in the rugged form of loner ‘Fred Carter’ (Stephen Boyd, 28), and quick as you can say “think it over, Mary” the lonely adults decide to tie the knot. Soon enough that turns into a noose when moody Fred reveals a sudden-rage issue.

Having usually tempestuous Hayward, 42, playing gentle & motherly wasn’t the easiest sell, but hard-nosed Hathaway had managed her temperament thru Rawhide, White Witch Doctor and Garden of Evil, and for this outing she tones down her tendency to play it to the parking lot. ’59 was Boyd’s big breakthrough year, displaying chiseled intensity in Ben-Hur and The Best Of Everything. Despite the script being hampered by pop psychology and a lame ending, the leads manage some effective scenes. No issue was made of their 14-year age discrepancy. Fair enough. Good moments between them would have been better served with a more capable child actor and by less accentuation from the score. Over-eager 9-year-old tyke Dennis Holmes did the usual flat-toned excited-shouting irk of most kid thesps of the day; his toybox of squeaks wear quickly. Though credited to Hugo Friedhofer the sap-tinged score also has elements cued in from Alfred Newman, Leigh Harline and David Buttolph, the blend making for a functional but generic soundtrack.

Set in Saskatchewan the location work was done up in California’s scenic Big Bear and out near Lone Pine, grand settings Hathaway was familiar with having done a number of countryside sagas in the terrain (The Trail of The Lonesome Pine and The Shepherd Of The Hills among them); the nice outdoorsy clean-air feel is mixed with too bright indoor sets and some obvious inserts from the studio vault, cribbing forest fire footage from Fox’s Red Skies Of Montana and wildlife scenes from several other films. Toss in quicksand, a fistfight, spousal and child abuse, a miscarriage and a blizzard. One observer,’Cinema Serf,’ snarked “a snow storm that must have all but exhausted the Californian confetti supply.”

Made for $1,700,000, grossing just $3,200,000, running for 103 minutes, with Theodore Bikel, Barbara Nichols (outta place up’n them woods), Ken Scott and Arthur Franz.