Mon passé défendu

For one thing you've got quite a bit of playing against type. Robert Mitchum as a microbiologist researcher with a profound sense of decency and honor? Melvyn Douglas as a layabout lady's man who would boink his own cousin if he thought he could enrich himself? Quite different from the bland but trustworthy best friend of the leading man he often plays. Ava Gardner may not be playing against type, but she is just so beautiful here - shiny hair, perfect bone structure, just one touch of Venus!

Dr. Mark Lucas (Mitchum), a poor researcher at Tulane, and Barbara Beaurevel (Gardner), a member of one of New Orleans' oldest, finest, and poorest families, are in love, but Barbara is always meeting him in secret. The reason is not exactly clear, unless she worries for her social reputation, but then again, what is so awful about being a medical researcher? Or maybe it is because her family wants her to marry a rich suitor. Mark goes away on a research trip for two months and comes back with a wife. This cuts Barbara to the core. Mark appears to have done this on the rebound because he has no satisfactory explanation. The wife is a cold fish who apparently would dump Mark if she found a richer or more exciting option. So why these two are together is puzzling.

Barbara wants to get Mark back, and for some reason she thinks getting her grandmother's inheritance, which has just been sitting around collecting dust for years, is the way to do that. Again, why? Mark apparently cares nothing for money. Maybe the best revenge is living well? But I digress. Barbara, with no more than her startling physical similarity to her grandmother, successfully collects her 900K inheritance from the trustee. But there is a catch. Grandma was a notorious woman. Grandma married a gambler who left her and their child for parts unknown. The insinuation is that Grandma became a prostitute or madame in New Orleans in order to get by. Like that has never happened before??? Oh the horror! So Barbara must keep her heritage and the source of her new found wealth a secret. And strangely, nobody outside of the family ever asks where the money came from.

Barbara does think she has found a way to get Mark back, and strangely enough it does require cash. But then her plan unexpectedly turns to tragedy. I'll let you watch and find out how this plays out.

I'd recommend this. I'd actually rate this at 6.5 if possible. Sure the script is moth eaten and the production code prevents the spelling out of the details of the original story, "Carriage", but Ava Gardner commands your attention as a woman scorned. It seems hard to believe, but she MUST have been scorned at one time to get the facial expressions down so pat. Melvyn Douglas injects some of his trademark wit into his largely despicable character so that he is more than just a two dimensional cliché.

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."

I enjoyed watching the web of intrigue unfold as a young New Orleans lady in the late 1800's attempts to use her inheritance to regain the man she loves. But there are others who are and have been plotting both for and against her, and her plans go awry. I eagerly watched to learn if the man she loved would suffer for her machinations, or if she would risk her societal position to save him. Unfortunately the ending left me cold, with too many questions left unanswered and with the feeling that Robert Mitchum was miscast in the role of the doctor she loves.

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.

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.