Gallant Lady

Ann Harding watches her aviator fiancee crash on takeoff, leaving her pregnant and alone. She wanders in a daze and is almost arrested, but Clive Brook, freshly released form prison for euthanizing a patient -- he's a doctor -- rescues her, and arranges for some friends of his to adopt the baby. Then he disappears while she works with antiques dealer Janet Beecher, with Brook occasionally dropping in to adore her and then get drunk. On a buying trip to Italy, she meets Count Tullio Carminati, who adores her. Then she runs into her son, played variously by Scotty Beckett and Dickie Moore -- my, how they grow! Now her birth son is fathered by an adoring Otto Kruger, who has a witch of a fiancee -- his wife having died -- in Betty Lawford. So Miss Harding decides to make Kruger adore her and marry her so she can be the mother to her own child, and Brook can go and get drunk in peace.

Miss Harding pulls off this piffle in her usual graceful way, although it's hard to believe she didn't wince occasionally at this script. So does everyone do a fine job of acting under the direction of Gregory La Cava as Miss Harding goes through enough changes of emotions that I'm surprised she doesn't have whiplash. She's enchanting when her character is happy and fulfilled in Italy, with Carminati singing at her from Italy to Paris, to shipboard back to the US. Likewise, it's nice to see Otto Kruger playing a nice guy. It's the didoes the script cuts to make sure that there's another twist in the plot that makes it ridiculous.

The 1930s gave us a lot of films about all-sacrificing mothers, such as "So Big", "Stella Dallas" and "Madame X"...and audiences loved them. "Gallant Lady" is also one of these movies, though the way it ends isn't nearly the same as these other films.

The story begins with a flyer dying on takeoff on some historic flight. His girlfriend is left behind...pregnant. She meets a man who befriends her and he helps her through her pregnancy and when she gives up her child for adoption. As the years pass, Sally (Ann Harding) is able to straighten out her life and make a success of herself but when she takes a cruise something hard to believe occurs....her biological son is on the ship and he and Sally become friends. Later, when Sally is hired by the boy's future step-mother, she sees firsthand how cold and mean she is to the kid...so she vows to take her fiance away and marry him herself...and then she'll be both the boy's biological and step-mother! How does all this work out?

This is a very good film but it does suffer from a few coincidences too many...that the adopted boy's mother would soon die, that Sally is on the same ship as the kid, etcetera. But if you can look past it, it is a fascinating and enjoyable film. Well made.

Ann Harding is on good form here in this drama about a mother trying to reclaim her son. Tragically unwed and broke, and with the help of the dipso ex-con doctor "Dan" (Clive Brooks), she had to put her young lad "Deedy" (Dickie Moore) up for adoption. Many years later when she learns that the adoptive mother has passed away, she is much more successful and senses that now might be the time to try and ingratiate herself with "Phillip" (Otto Kruger) and the young boy - and see if she can't get more firmly established in both of their lives. She won't have an easy ride, though, but gets off to a decent start as they meet on the Queen Mary travelling to Europe. On that trip, she also meets "Count Carniri" (Tullio Carminati) who takes a shine to her and might just prove a fly in her ointment when it comes to getting her son back. Faced with choices that may not be her first, she makes some decisions that might reunite her with her child, but at what price her own happiness? The plot is standard melodrama stuff, but Harding really does stand out with one of her more convincing performances. The scenes with the young lad work well, are quite emotional and do support the almost addictive maternal feeling that underpins most of this story. Brooks is also quite effective as the drunken physician, but there's just a bit too much dialogue and the support elements (except the young Moore) don't really make much impact. It stays the right side of sentimentality once we are up and running, and there's some feisty humour here too.

Gregory LaCava's "Gallant Lady is probably not a movie that most people nowadays would recognize, but it deserves acknowledgement. Ann Harding plays a widow forced to give her son up for adoption. Some years later, she starts looking for a way to get back into her son's life.

I'd say that the movie's strength is the focus on tragedy, as the protagonist watches her husband's death and sees her once ideal life collapse. I guess that in later years, this could've expanded into a look at trying to make her own way in the world, or investigating her finances to make sure that her husband hadn't mismanaged their money (which was the focus of the 2000 comedy "Saving Grace"). I guess that our society wasn't quite ready to see a woman do that back then.

I understand that Ann Harding frequently cast as self-sacrificing women, some might say typecast. This is the first time that I've seen one of her roles, so I wouldn't know. The movie apparently got remade as "Always Goodbye" with Barbara Stanwyck. Since that came about during the Hays Code, I wonder what the changes were. Either way, this is definitely a movie that I recommend. Check it out if you can find it.

Though the plotline is pure melodramatic slush (there were a lot of unwed mother stories in the pre-Code period: Constance Bennett seemed to have the patent on the roles), what Gregory La Cava did with the material is almost miraculous. He introduced characters (played by Clive Brook and Janet Beecher) who always seem to have a wisecrack, a withering aside, or a snide remark on hand when things were getting too heavy-handed. Their characters (as well as Tullio Carmanati) help to lighten the load, and before you know it, the movie is transformed from a weepie to a comedy. Of course, the (very rushed) ending brings the movie back to its melodramatic roots, but it's still very engaging most of the way through. And Ann Harding's verbal jousts with Brook and Beecher remind the viewer that she had been a top comedienne early in her career, as the prime interpreter of Phillip Barry (HOLIDAY, ANIMAL KINGDOM, PARIS BOUND).