Directed by Mel Ferrer for RKO Radio Pictures, it also featured a rare screen appearance of Broadway legend Jane Cowl,[2] with Paul Kelly also in support.

Wealthy touring classical pianist Ellen Ewing is standing at the altar with fiancé David McLean when an intruder stops the marriage ceremony and accuses her of already having wed a few months prior.

The stranger claims that this can be verified by the registrar at the small seaside village of Fairview (where Ellen's family has a home, and she indeed had spent time overlapping the date of the alleged nuptial).

A call is placed by the Ewing family's longtime lawyer, Gregory Kent, accompanied by the district attorney, Eric Lowell, a recent former suitor still smarting sharply from his jilting.

She is held for trial and tormented by her former suitor, who’s not only prosecuting the case himself to avoid the charge of impropriety should he allow a subordinate to do it, but clearly being vengeful towards Ellen for her spurning.

There, by accident, he finds a seashell among Ellen's things that she had described to David as evidence that could help substantiate her story of her whereabouts and doings on the date of the alleged wedding ceremony.

He and Kent visit Ellen and tell her she's been cleared and will be set free, but immediately after appearing to grasp it and return to reality she shrieks in horror and flees.

Unconcerned, he confesses he’d been behind the whole thing, seeking revenge on Ellen's father, a judge, for an injustice the man had inflicted on him—a four-year sentence in an insane asylum he says he didn't deserve.

They will be free to wed. Bosley Crowther lambasted the film, especially the screenplay, writing, "Things must be tough in the picture business when such a respectable cast as is in The Secret Fury, now on the Paramount's screen, descends to such cheap and lurid twaddle as this R.K.O.

melodrama is, Claudette Colbert, Robert Ryan, Paul Kelly, Philip Ober, Jane Cowl and even José Ferrer in a 'bit' role are the major performers who expend more physical energy than intelligence on this wantonly unintelligible tale.... To lay any blame on the performers for the nonsense that takes place on the screen would be an obvious injustice.