Amarga sombra

I fail to see how the movie was sexist or racist considering the timeframe. In fact, the movie shows a woman can perform well in a position tradionally held by men. Only recently up into the 70s were women being comepletely accepted in male dominated positions. Only recently were MDs required to give honest brutal but truthful information to their patients. They would withold some information if they felt is was beneficial to their patient. As far as patient confidentiality goes. HIPAA was not around then and a husband just as entitled to know about his wife's medical condition as she was. As far as a husband developing an affair with a coworker. Where and when does that not take place today? In fact, this movie may have predicted a complication of coed workforces that were not too common back then. It doesn't take much of a brain and a tiny bit of history to understand the setting of this movie. Now speaking from a medical professional, I can say the death was a little too clean for a person dying of cancer, but back then showing such misery and horror was frowned upon. Look at how people died in war movies back then. She would have shown progressive weight loss, signs of anemia, growing weakness, etc. But, even now I see people who seem to be doing fine, get hospitalized and are dead within a week or two. In the end, the movie was one of the pioneer movies to address the depressive and taboo subject of dying of cancer, something really only as recent as the late 60s and early 70s was able to be more open about. Though it is not a classic tearjerker, it is a sad and depressive movie about the real threat of carncer and I would recommend it to classic movie buffs and those wishing to study how Hollywood tackled death and dying in the films.

I have seen many films of this theme a la dying of incurable illness.. Bette Davis made her dynamic imprint with Dark Victory. Lana Turner moved beyond soap opera and made Madame X impossible to not weep in her demise.. Margaret Sullavan simplifies and shines in a glowing performance in this film.. With her incredibly unique speaking voice,her subtleties that are hers alone,this is an experience to marvel and weep over time and time again. An undervalued jewel!

No actress during the golden age of Hollywood handled death with more soulful dignity than Margaret Sullavan, an actress unjustly forgotten even though she gave peerless performances in MGM classics like Frank Borzage's "Three Comrades" and Ernst Lubitsch's "The Shop Around the Corner". This modestly budgeted 1950 sudser was her last film, a decade before her own untimely death from a drug overdose. This was one of only sixteen Sullavan made since she preferred acting on stage rather than celluloid, which was a shame since she was utterly sublime no matter what the vehicle. In this appropriate swan song, Sullavan plays Mary Scott, a suburban wife and mother who learns too late that she is dying of cancer. Director Rudolph Maté holds the camera on the veteran actress for long takes as she reacts to this news.

Maté lets her mercurial moods dictate the tone of the film and allows Mary to find a way to die in the most mature way possible. This is where the insightful screenplay by Howard Koch ("Casablanca") rates a cut above similar-minded soap operas. Witness the adult way he has Mary deal with her husband Brad's infidelity and her pragmatic approach in setting up Brad's assistant-turned-mistress, a serious-minded Norwegian draftsperson named Chris, as her successor in the family. While Mary's selflessness is likely to look excessive by contemporary standards, Sullavan brings such an affecting combination of pathos and intelligence to her character that she transcends the innate limitations of the material, including a few predictable turns like a high-speed drive on a deserted highway and a comically drunken scene in an all-night diner.

She even has a couple of moments where she gets to recreate famous dramatic cues from "Three Comrades" such as her irritation at the ticking of an alarm clock and her valiant struggle to get out of bed. Character actor Wendell Corey does a fine job as Brad as does Viveca Lindfors ("The Way We Were") as early feminist Chris, although their affair is severely downplayed to appease 1950 censors. At 11, Natalie Wood was still five years away from "Rebel Without a Cause", but she manages to play Mary and Brad's precocious daughter with aplomb. The film has a low-budget look about it, but it doesn't take away from Sullavan's artistry which is on full display here. To the strains of Brahms' "Symphony no. 1 in C minor", the last scene packs the necessary emotional wallop even though you know the film's outcome from nearly the beginning. There is a newly remastered print on the 2011 DVD release.

I do like sad movies, ones that tugs at your heartstrings, I do love the movie Somewhere in Time by the way. However this movie is the most frustrating movie I have watched in a long time. What I don't like about this so-called tearjerker is that the wife, played by Margaret Sullivan, never tells her husband she is dying. He only finds it out at the very end of the movie by error when he sees a pill bottle on the bedroom table and calls up the doctor who tells him. Even the doctor doesn't tell him. She thinks she's saving him grief by not telling him, but to me she's just selfish. This was six months after she knew she had cancer. The first half an hour was okay, but when her husband is having an affair with his co-worker, even then she tells no one. Nothing in this movie seemed genuine. They even played a melody from a Brahm's symphony which I love, over and over to the point where I couldn't stand to listen to it any more. The acting was artificial from everyone. If you like soap operas this might be enjoyable, but for people who like sad movies every once in a while, this was disappointing and a waste of my time. Margaret Sullivan's last movie was not her best

Well-heeled wife and mother in her forties, feeling run-down and believing she might be pregnant (!), learns from her doctor she only has ten months left to live; she keeps her secret from her husband and daughter, and doesn't interfere when her spouse gets eyes for another lady. Adapted from Ruth Southard's novel by Howard Koch, this is an infuriating undergraduate of the "Dark Victory" school of script-writing. Solely for the sake of melodrama, Margaret Sullavan's harried housewife begs her doctor to tell her the truth, but doesn't extend the same courtesy to her own husband (Wendell Corey, who instead asks over and over if she's all right, all the while with a pained expression on his face). Strictly a 'woman's picture' of the time, with a magazine serial-styled plot. Some of the dialogue confounds one with its absurdity, and Sullavan is far too efficient and business-like for a one-woman pity party. Natalie Wood skips through the movie in old-fashioned print dresses and braids, but Viveca Lindfors gets the worst of it in the obtuse role of a war-widow who begins to feel like a woman again when she's out with a married man. ** from ****