My Reputation

A young widow is criticized for trying to build a new life in "My Reputation," a 1946 film starring Barbara Stanwyck, George Brent, Lucile Watson, and Eve Arden. Some time after Stanwyck's husband dies from a protracted illness, the lonely and devastated woman goes on a skiing trip and meets an army major, played by George Brent. She falls in love with him, but gossip circulates about her and affects two sons.

The film is dated, but Stanwyck is wonderful in an emotional role of a woman who all her life was cowed by her mother's ideas of convention and always afraid to stand up for herself. Brent is okay as her leading man, but if he was supposed to be this love 'em and leave 'em type, he didn't pull it off. He seems too staid. Eve Arden has a small role that perhaps was cut down - she has very little to do and disappears for the last half of the film. It's strange because she seemed to be encouraging the relationship, but why isn't she present to come to Jessica's defense? It's the same crowd of friends, so it's odd that she's missing.

This is an entertaining film with an excellent performance by Stanwyck.

Wartime soap-romance with Stanwyck, and she's excellent even by her own lofty standards, as a young Chicago widow with children whom the Lake Shore Drive set doesn't know what to do with. Her pompous mama, an amusing Lucille Watson, and her two sensible sons want her to be a conventional widow. Then she meets George Brent... The mid-century problem of what role a woman without a man is supposed to play is dealt with with some insight, and it must have resonated mightily in 1946, with so many women thrust into this unfamiliar territory. Brent, so handsome in his youth, was by this time puffy and artificial-looking, and isn't an ideal love object. Nor is Eve Arden given enough to do in a conventional best-pal role. But Stanwyck's so graceful and sturdy, and the Warners production so assured, that you stick with it and root for the pair to triumph over their gossipy milieu. It ends pretty abruptly and not altogether convincingly, but there are many good scenes along the way, and we sure do love Babs.

Barbara Stanwyck's self proclaimed favorite amongst her films this classy soap opera is uniformly well acted and well appointed. It would seem after viewing the film that she was so fond of it because it afforded her the opportunity for many shades of emotion as a recent widow struggling with conflicting feelings. First there are the responsibilities to her young sons who are still recovering from the loss of their father something that is being constantly pointed out by her shrew of a mother, the great Lucile Watson. At first she seems resigned to basically being a professional widow sacrificing any life of her own for her duties and then suddenly George Brent enters the picture and she starts to realize that perhaps there might be a chance for something of her own again, an idea supported by her good friend Eve Arden but then her judgmental mother and false friends make her question her right to happiness. Good stuff movingly enacted.

"My Reputation" is a good example of a certain kind of vintage Hollywood product: it's glossy, yet carries certain real truths. In beautifully modeled black and white, set in a tony upper-class milieu, and with one of Max Steiner's creamiest scores, it examines a young matron's search for autonomy, when her husband dies after a long illness. Set in 1942, it makes numerous references to the war, so possibly this post-war film was meant to allude to the loss that many wives suffered due to the war (or it was one of those films made during the war but not released for several years).

I think Barbara Stanwyck was incapable of giving a bad performance. Whatever the material, she shone and was absolutely "there." Early in the film there is a scene in which she reads a letter that her late husband had written in the knowledge that it would be read after his death, and she is devastating. There's a kind of bookend scene at the film's end when she tries to explain to her children the nature of her love for a man who has come into her life after their father's death, and again she breaks your heart. In much of that scene she is in shadow as she speaks, so that her voice alone carries the emotion.

Having just lost her husband after an extended illness, "Jessica Drummond" (Barbara Stanwyck) has two boys and a controlling mother to contend with while she becomes increasingly lonely. The constant pressure on her to conform in the manner that a widow is expected to act in the early 40's begins to wear on her terribly. So, when it all gets too much she decides to accept the advise of a close friend named "Ginna Abbott" (Eve Arden) to accompany her husband "Cary Abbott" (John Ridgely) and her to Lake Tahoe for a winter vacation. While there she meets an army major by the name of "Scott Landis" (George Brent) who suddenly makes her feel alive again after such a long time. Unfortunately for her, the high society in which she has lived all her life doesn't accept the fact that she has begun seeing another man even though she hasn't done anything wrong. At any rate, rather than divulge the entire story I will just say that this is a good drama about social pressures during the period of time when America had just entered World War II. There is some moralizing here but the film also gives another point-of-view at the same time as well. A pretty good movie all things considered.