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After Ginger Rogers scored so well in a serious drama like Stage Door, the brass there were less reluctant to give her substantial parts. Ginger gives a great performance in Primrose Path, a good lead into what would be her Oscar winner with Kitty Foyle that same year.

The play by Robert Buckner and Walter Hart is based on a most steamy novel February Hill by Victoria Lincoln. February Hill was apparently the God's Little Acre of its day, it's steamy sex scenes had to be toned down considerably for the stage and even more so for the Code driven cinema of 1940. The novel and play were set in my area of the country, Buffalo and later out near Lake Canandaigua which is a considerable distance away.

In toning down the sex the screenwriters also switched the location to Northern California and with that making Primrose Path look a whole lot like John Steinbeck's work and characters. But no matter how you slice it, no denying that Ginger's white trash family make their living with prostitution, a low class version of Leslie Caron's family in Gigi.

Ginger thinks there's something better out there and her mother Marjorie Rambeau encourages her in that. She meets up with a nice, low key owner of a gas station and greasy spoon restaurant down the road in Joel McCrea. He's better than some of the low life men who her mother and grandmother would you believe consort with. He's also a lot better package than her own father, the alcoholic Miles Mander.

Primrose Path doesn't age well for today, it's a case of the Code seriously compromising the nature of the material. If it were remade today we'd see a more frank version. The players do fine with their roles and Marjorie Rambeau got an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress, but lost to Jane Darwell for The Grapes Of Wrath.

Try and think of who you might cast in a remake today of Primrose Path. I could see Brendan Fraser in Joel McCrea's part myself.

This is one of Gregory La Cava's last pictures and doesn't seem to be very well known. Film critic Andrew Sarris didn't seem to think much of it in his book The American Cinema, and rates it as one of his lower pictures. I never would of watched this movie before until i discovered how great Ginger Rogers was and now i want to watch all her films. Rogers plays a poor girl who lives in the slums with a drunk father, a prostitute for a mother and some other relatives. Rogers has no interest in guys until she meets Joel McCrea at a restaurant and they wind up married. She lies about her family to him and it causes some problems between them. Ginger Rogers is good as usual and Joel McCrea is very good as the husband.

Joel McCrea and Ginger Rogers did some of their best work in this picture. The story is a great one, and it was well executed. It should have made the list of 100 greatest American films, but there are flaws. Two of the secondary character are caricatures - the grandmother and the little sister were overplayed. The father, while perhaps realistic, came off as a melodramatic, sick joke. The coverage of one of the main themes, prostitution, was handled too graphically for 1940's audiences and too "victorianly" for modern audiences. But these are really minor complaints. I think Ginger Rogers did a great job, and should have gotten an academy award. When I first watched it, before I found out when the movie was made, I thought it must have been very early, say 1933, because she was very convincing as an apparent teenager - say a 19 year old. I should have realized the movie was not that old, as the direction, cinematography, and other secondary production aspects were much better, definitely in the "Citizen Kane" ranks. And after all, Ginger was very good at playing women a lot younger than she (see "The Major and the Minor"). Joel McCrea was also excellent, showing again that if he would have resisted his urges to play cowboys he could have developed a reputation as one of the greatest American film stars (see "Foreign Correspondent"). I am happy to see that IMDb users rate this film above 6.0, but I think it is much better than that.

Joel McCrea & Ginger Rogers star in this tale of a romance from across the tracks. Rogers lives in a ramshackle home populated by a ramshackle family who's matriarch is a lady of the night & the patriarch is a souse. When she meets McCrea, who is a go-getter working at a gas station slash hash-house, she thinks her financial woes are over & soon marries him but when the truth of Rogers' family come to bear, McCrea feels trapped & betrayed & acts accordingly (at least he thinks so). Mixing humor, pathos & romance in what could've been an unsavory package, this film finds the right note for the telling.

I thoroughly enjoyed the acting in this film: Ginger Rogers as the daughter of prostitute Marjorie Rambeau (an Oscar nomination), who supports the family; Joel McCrea as the man Rogers sort of ropes into marrying; Miles Mander as her educated alcoholic father, who can translate Greek but is otherwise useless and knows it; Queenie Vassar as her grandmother, an ex-prostitute who would rather see Rogers become a prostitute than settle down with McCrea; and the remarkable young child actress, Joan Carroll as Rogers' young sassy kid sister. Her rendition of the poem "Don't Swat Your Mother, Boys" was a hoot. When McCrea meets Rogers as she digs for clams, and steals a kiss (her first one) as he starts to gives her a lift home, she falls in love. That night she goes to see McCrea at the Bluebell Club and lies when she says she's run away and can't return, never mentioning her family for fear of alienating him. They marry, but of course the truth comes out eventually, creating a rift. The acting is so natural I felt as though I was looking into a window observing the lives of these people.

The word "prostitute" is never mentioned (it would have given the 1940 censors apoplexy), but it was obvious anyway. Still, the film was banned in Detroit, and the play was modified to placate those censors. Queenie Vassar was primarily a stage actress; this was her first film.