Mon passé défendu

Romantic melodrama hung with Spanish moss, My Forbidden Past is so much gaudy claptrap. Taking several actors who made their names in the hot crucible of film noir and plunking them into a tired, costumed period-piece showed perverse ingenuity. The plot involves duplicitous machinations within a love...trapezoid?...in New Orleans at some vague juncture between the Surrender at Appomatox and the Guns of August, 1914.

Both Robert Mitchum and Ava Gardner, as the "good" lovers, flail around like fish out of water; the best performances come from the skunks: Melvyn Douglas, Lucile Watson and, especially, Janis Carter, as Gardner's rival (and in the same league of tough cookies; she has been called, from her relative few appearances, the "poor man's Barbara Stanwyck").

The most baffling part of the movie concerns Gardner's deceased grandmother, whose name MUST NOT BE UTTERED! Mixed blood? It's just left that she was a "notorious" woman -- what, a voodoo priestess? Her life story sounds like better watching than these silly 70 minutes.

This movie is not great. Just how many boring movies did Howard Hughes make? But it does have two of the beautiful and fascinating stars of the Hollywood Golden Age: Ava Gardner and Robert Mitchum. Melvyn Douglas (who doesn't look so good in this) plays Ava's fey playboy cousin. There are a couple of good lines. The plot is slim and the movie is not long. Only 71 minutes, for those with a short attention span.

We're never told exactly what Ava's forbidden past is, but it has to do with her grandmother. Was she a prostitute? Maybe it's supposed to be ambiguous.

The man who directed it made the 1940s "Jane Eyre" with Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine and also the Disney "Mary Poppins."

While the story meanders and wavers,and at times seems like a quick spin off of "Gone with the Wind", some of the scenes and closeups with Ava Gardner are lovely and amazing.

Robert Mitchum as a research physician studying at Tulane;Gardner the unrequited love who delivers a letter to him before he leaves to go up north. Mitchum returns to New Orleans with a new brassy blonde in tow. She is clearly an opportunist who wants Mitchum for his future fortune, unlike Ava who claims to truly love him.She uses an ill-gotten inheritance to tempt him, there is a scandal and she indeed reminds us of Scarlett O'Hara.

This film also reminds one of "Raintree County" another imitation of "Gone with the Wind" with Elizabeth Taylor as the set-piece.ThIs film though has several nice sets of Old New Orleans,the manners and customs and varied cultures,and with the lovely Gardner in several memorable shots, is well worth a look.

MY FORBIDDEN PAST does not full its punches. It is a full-blooded melodrama set in a time and place where social distinctions matter. Barbara Beaurevel (Ava Gardner) and her cousin Paul (Melvyn Douglas) live in comfortable gentility with Aunt Eula (Lucile Watson). They believe in the kind of social niceties that dictate one's choice of marriage partner, as well as one's future life; those who fail to make the grade are abruptly rebuffed. Hence when Barbara falls in love with industrious yet self-made researcher Mark Lucas (Robert Mitchum), trouble is bound to occur. Robert Stevenson's film boils up to a satisfying courtroom climax in which an inevitable deus ex machina allows a happy ending to take place.

Despite the fact that the film remains relentlessly studio-bound (with only a few second unit shots denoting time and place), it makes a creditable effort of portraying a world riddled with hypocrisies, where Lucas is treated with as much disdain as the African American servant (Clarence Muse) working for the Beaurevel family. Douglas makes an eminently hissable villain with his thin pencil mustache and courtly manners, that do not prevent him from making a pass at Lucas' wife (Janis Carter) in a self-interested act of revenge for Lucas' falling in love with Barbara. Mitchum looks uncomfortable in the cloistered surroundings of a research laboratory, but becomes a formidable adversary for Douglas. Gardner doesn't have much to do, except proclaim her love for Lucas in a series of close-ups; this task she accomplishes competently. Given the constraints of her background, we cannot help but sympathize with her as she tries to escape through love.

Robert Mitchum and Ava Gardner make for handsome leads in this drama, but both seem out of place in this costume drama set a post-Civil War New Orleans. Gardner is spurned by Mitchum, but when she suddenly comes into wealth, she decides to use her money to win back Mitchum and exact her revenge. Mitchum is one of my favorite actors, but this is not his sort of picture. Gardner too for that matter. The leads make this film worth watching, but just barely.