Thus the following March saw the release of Fortune is a Woman (1957), a film noir from Frank Launder, critically undervalued in its day and since slighted by its producer Sidney Gilliat, who hated its elements of the whodunnit - which are precisely what sustain the tension. The script is intelligent yet complicated, involving an insurance assessor, Oliver Bramwell (Jack Hawkins), who investigates a fire at a country house where he meets Tracey Moreton (Dennis Price) and his wife Sarah (Arlene Dahl), with whom he has previously had an affair. When Oliver returns to the house alone, he finds Tracey dead and the house set on fire. He marries Sarah, but the mysteries of the house return to haunt them. Characterisation is robust and convincing, and direction polished and inventive.

The film commences with a brief introduction of the main leitmotif over the Columbia and Launder–Gilliat production credits, the six-note love motif reflecting exactly the accented stresses of the phrase “for-tune-is-a-wo-man”:

Launder and Gilliat were unhappy with the title but considered the American title She Played with Fire worse. When the film's adapter Val Valentine thought of the perfect title, Red Sky at Night, it was too late. For the sake of concordance with the composer's leitmotif, perhaps it was just as well. It is significant that Alwyn was again playing with voice patterning, albeit an unspoken voice heard only in the musician’s, and hopefully his audience’s, head. Later in the film he would experiment in another way.

As soon as the production credits finish, the film swiftly propels the audience into a dream sequence, commencing with the relentless beat of a metronome. One recalls Launder's metronome in the dream sequence of I See a Dark Stranger : in neither case is the device's relevance obvious. Probably no more is implied than the “dumb remorseless beat of time”, as Alwyn puts it in one of his poems. In Fortune is a Woman the rhythm is caught by a car's windscreen wipers, a regular musical beat in which trumpets –

– and xylophone predominate, counterpointed by tremolo woodwind and strings. Beyond the car windscreen, the headlamps reveal the heavy doors of a stately home: the music slows broodingly, horns sound menacingly.