La Manière forte

Greatly enjoyed this 1942 film starring Ida Lupino,(Mrs.Helen Chernen) who was married to a man who worked in a coal mine and Helen took care of her younger sister, Katie Chernen,(Joan Leslie). Helen hated the town they lived in and also her husband and wanted a bigger and better future for Katie. Katie met up with Albert Runkel, (Jack Carson) who worked on the stage as a song and dance team with Paul Collins, (Dennis Morgan). Katie has a great singing voice and can dance and Albert falls in love with her and gets her into his act. However, behind the scenes is Helen who is scheming to get her sister into big time show business and decides to get her sister married to Albert and runs off and leaves her husband and goes away with her sister and Albert. This story is really about the great actress Ginger Rogers and how her mother pushed her daughter into show business at all costs. They even offered Ginger Rogers a part in this picture, but she refused. Great Classic film, don't miss seeing it on TV.

The siren lure of show business must have had a more irresistible song in the days when stars, in the flesh, came right to towns like Pocatello, Idaho and Biloxi, Mississippi. The dreams were delivered fresh and piping hot, not through the many scrims of television and movie screens, and not through the machinations of crafty publicists and a fawning press. That's the milieu of Green Hill, a sooty steeltown where Helen Chernen (Ida Lupino) has cut her losses and her hopes until her little sister (Joan Leslie) gets a whiff of the greasepaint and hears the roar of the crowd. Lupino up and leaves her laborer husband to propel sis right to the boulevard of broken dreams. First steps on the stampede to the top are the mediocre vaudeville duo of Jack Carson and Dennis Morgan; Leslie marries Carson but leaves him in the dust at Lupino's bidding. Soon Leslie is poised to be the toast of all Broadway, but the tinsel is turning to ashes, and she's turning against her unstoppable bulldozer of a big sister. The bookends of this story told in flashback involve an ermine wrap, a pier on New York's waterfront, and a couple of New York cops....You get the idea. The Hard Way still packs a punch (after all these years), if a punch somewhat softened with a tinge of nostalgia. This is one of Lupino's strongest roles (along with Lily in Road House), and at her best she makes you wonder why she didn't achieve the superstardom of a Davis, a Hepburn, or a Stanwyck. She's just that good.

...And too many gray characters with the exception of Jack Carson as the sincere but simple Albert Runkel.

Even the alleged villainess of the story, Helen (Ida Lupino) starts out with the best intentions. She lives in hopeless poverty in a mill town with natural surroundings that are even ugly with coal slag and air clouded with smoke bellowing from the local factories. She doesn't want to see her sister suffer her fate - loveless marriage with never enough money - so she takes her first false step. She pushes younger sister Katie into marriage with malleable vaudevillian Albert Runkel, and uses that marriage as an excuse to leave the poverty of Green Hill and her marriage behind. Poor old underachieving Sam - Helen's husband - is never mentioned again.

The problem is that, over time, Helen forgets that she is doing what she is doing for Katie to get ahead. It's not enough that she get ahead, Katie has to be on top, and there is nobody too close or too vulnerable for Helen to step on to get Katie on the next rung of stardom. Eventually this becomes more about Helen's success with Katie as the golden goose that she is slowly choking to death.

WB emphasizes the dramatic portion of this film rather than the musical, and that is good since the two musical numbers included are underwhelming. Fortunately, WB didn't have Joan Leslie be the centerpiece of more than one of them since singing and dancing were never her forte. Also fortunately, there is at least a number by talented WB tenor Dennis Morgan. It's just too bad that the material wasn't better.

This was probably the best dramatic role Ida Lupino ever had. It's definitely worth it if you are a fan of Warner Brothers' output product in the 1940s.

A question I have - Dennis Morgan is always going on as to how the dream of all humble people is a house in the country with ten kids. But how do you support ten kids in the middle of nowhere? It seems our leading man has high ideals but not many practical ones. It would have been instructive to drop in on him in ten years and see how that "dream of all humble people" was working out for him. But I digress.

Rarely seen these days, and unavailable on tape, THE HARD WAY is a melodramatic gem, vaulted by five strong performances. True, the beginning looks as if we are going to watch 'Mildred Pierce', and, true, the ending is totally false if you know anything about the theater at all. Despite the script's weaknesses, this is a film to see, and I am glad that I have been able to obtain a copy. Ida Lupino is excellent as the grasping, obsessive, manipulative elder sister who pushes her younger sibling into show biz prominence. Lupino won the N.Y. Film Critics' honors but, surprisingly, was not nominated for an Oscar. It is a strong performance that, perhaps, needs a little shading here and there. Joan Leslie has an even more demanding role, however, in that her personality and growth is altered throughout the film. She is exquisite even though, as it often was in films of the 40's, the show-within-a-show sequences really are weak. Leslie's career ended because she was essentially blacklisted after she sued to get out of her Warner Bros. contract. (She had been considered to be the lead in 'The Constant Nymph' so some saw her emerging talents!). Jack Carson is remarkable, as he would be later in such films as 'The Tattered Dress'; Dennis Morgan gives his best acting work; and Gladys George, in a cameo, is wonderful even though it is evident the character is out-of-focus in terms of the way in which Broadway works (she never would have been given just one song in a revue). Vincent Sherman's direction is uniformly good in that it often leaps over plot contrivances and zeroes in on the performances. Leslie's acting abilities would be wasted until she free-lanced in REPEAT PERFORMANCE, BORN TO BE BAD (a better look at Broadway), and others. THE HARD WAY remains a forgotten and generally fine film.

Ida Lupino plays the ruthless, ambitious, domineering sister of Joan Leslie in "The Hard Way."

The film starts with Lupino attempting suicide by jumping off a bridge, and the resulting story is one big flashback. Unhappily married in an ugly industrial town, Lupino sees a way out for herself and her sister, played by Joan Leslie, when two vaudevillians, Jack Carson and Dennis Morgan, come into town.

Carson soon is married to Leslie and Lupino joins everyone on the road, beginning her path of destruction to make way for Leslie in the big time.

Ida Lupino does a terrific job, as does the entire cast, including a wonderful appearance by Gladys George. Leslie is fresh and young but no phenomenal musical talent, so one has to attribute Lupino's drive to her success! A very good Warners Bros. Offering.