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Agony and euphoria of sacrifice, mater semper certa est. "A business course to improve herself" for the mill-town gal (Barbara Stanwyck), it snares the moneyed milquetoast (John Boles). He professes to like her the way she is but winces when taking her to swanky parties, she's more simpatico with the raucous butterball, "a judge of horseflesh" (Alan Hale). Still, her greatest love is for the daughter (Anne Shirley) who turns class go-between, mediating the lived-in roughness of one side and the rarefied gentility of the other. King Vidor in The Patsy sees the comedy of this, here the tragic considerations are pulled into the image of wounded broad and consoling seedling intertwined in the dark of a moving train. "A common-looking creature" but also the fiercest character in sight, as befits the director's admiration for female vitality, a jangling force—a bit of itching powder amid commuters brings out her screwball streak, "things are just a little too quiet around here." (The unattended birthday party that follows reveals the censorious toll.) Maternal passion is the Vidor torrent here, ungainly and embarrassing and sublime, it "uses up all the feelings I got and I don't seem to have any left for anybody else," a full-throttled study by Stanwyck. "Stacks of style" not appreciated by country-club bluebloods, meanwhile her widowed opposite number (Barbara O'Neil) oozes brittle kindness. "When you've cried together and when you've been through things together, that's when you seem to love the most." The heroine is an actress putting on a painful performance when pushing her daughter away, when watching her getting married in the movie screen of a mansion window she's a member of the audience, drenched with rain and tears. "Read between the pitiful lines." The best analysis is by Ozu in Late Spring. With Marjorie Main, George Walcott, Ann Shoemaker, Tim Holt, Nella Walker, and Lillian Yarbo. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |