Mannequin

Pace Dickinson, hope is a light bulb flickering in a dingy tenement staircase, you adjust it every day until it goes out. The seamstress (Joan Crawford) toils all day only to come home to a cramped Lower East Side apartment, where Dad (Oscar O'Shea) rises from the sofa on occasion to swat her sarcastic brother (Leo Gorcey). Saturday night with the boxing promoter (Alan Curtis) means a fleeting respite amid Coney Island lights, their impulsive marriage is above all a way out of Hester Street. "A streetcar could've done that, and cost less," snaps her best friend (Mary Philips). The honeymoon dinner at the Chinese-Jewish restaurant is noticed by another escapee from the slums, the self-made millionaire (Spencer Tracy) who won't take "no" for an answer. "You really don't blame me for kissing you, do you?" "What do you think that slap was? A Distinguished Service Cross?" His romantic ideals corroded by monetary realities, Frank Borzage wonders if emotive metaphysics can still survive materialistic bitterness. (Bad Girl and Man's Castle are visible throughout, in place of dreamy waifs is a pragmatic heroine who states that "partnerships dissolve.") The husband is a chiseler not opposed to the wife cozying up to a smitten moneybags, Mom (Elisabeth Risdon) looks back at her own lost dreams when dispensing advice about a woman's search for happiness: "If you have to, get it alone." Chorus girl in the "Gebhart Frolics" to salon clotheshorse modeling Adrian numbers, the divorcee following the Crawford anthem ("Always, Always") and starting over with the tycoon facing ruination. "It has something to do with love, hasn't it?" Through Albee's Everything in the Garden it passes to arrive at Lyne's Indecent Proposal. With Ralph Morgan, Gwen Lee, George Chandler, Bert Roach, Marie Blake, Matt McHugh, and Paul Fix. In black and white.