This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
Jandy Hardesty’s review published on Letterboxd:
This review may contain spoilers.
Here's the frustrating thing with a lot of Pre-Codes.
(Uh, spoilers)
They have these amazing, strong, fierce women who end up trammeled by circumstances and men into giving up their lives, their children, their ambitions, and their everything for NOTHING.
Lulu Smith (Stanwyck) starts this one off by storming into the small town library where she works and saying "I wish I owned this library. Because I'd take an axe and smash the whole thing up. Then I'd set the whole town on fire and play the ukulele while it burned." AWESOME. Best entrance line ever. She's fed up, and she takes out all her savings and goes on a trip to Havana.
Then she falls into an affair with a guy (Adolphe Menjou) who drunkenly crashed her stateroom, but fair enough, she's impulsive but she knows what she wants, and when he eventually reveals he's married she understandably blows up at him and kicks him out. Two years later he meets up with her again and surprise surprise she has a two-year-old. (Pre-Code, yup yup.)
Then circumstances arise such that she ends up giving her daughter to him and his wife to protect him from scandal. Which, let me say, as the mother of a two-year-old, NOPE. Those scenes were pretty gut-wrenching for me. I do understand within the context of that time why she did it, though seriously, they couldn't have come up with some better plan? But here's the kicker. She has another nice blow-up at him for being basically a heel and wanting to continue his affair with her in secret while his wife raises their love-child, and I was like HELL YEAH, YOU TELL HIM GIRL. Then literally five seconds after she huffs off, she walks back, and is like, yeah, okay, let's do that secret affair thing.
AND THEY DO FOR TWENTY YEARS.
All the while he's running a successful political campaign. And then right when he's up for governor, he decides he's had enough of his marriage and all the secrecy and wants to tell everyone and run away with Lulu to Havana again. She's like, dude, the time for that is done, just do your thing. And she's kind of right, but also, she's given up her whole life for this jackass. And then on his deathbed, he tries to at least give her half his estate and reveal the truth in a handwritten will, but she won't even let him do that, because SELF-SACRIFICE.
I think if they'd played up the angle a little bit more that she was doing it for her daughter's sake (and that was clearly part of it), it would've been a little better. Of course, then it would've been Stella Dallas, and Stanwyck wasn't due to play that for another five years.
I actually did quite like the movie, though. Stanwyck sells, baby. She even sells ridiculous plots like this. Although when she was giving him the "don't give up everything now, because I've given up my life to let you have it and don't let that be in vain" speech, you could kind of feel that Stanwyck was going "geez this is dumb" in the back of her head.