The Other Love

A truly irresistible piece of high-fashion schmaltz, The Other Love stars Barbara Stanwyck in the sort of 'genteel weepy' role more commonly associated with Norma Shearer or Joan Fontaine. A lady pianist dying of some unspecified lung disease. Whatever her illness may be, it only makes her grow more glamorous the closer she edges towards death.

Of course, dying in so decorous a fashion would take a bite out of anybody's schedule. So our Babs cuts short her international concert tour, and checks into a plush clinic with a panoramic view of the Swiss Alps. There she meets David Niven, a handsome doctor who takes a more-than-professional interest in her case. Frankly, I found his fascination with Babs and her illness to be downright ghoulish - and couldn't help wondering if he was a closet necrophiliac.

Realising, perhaps, that Niven is far too lightweight to make a convincing leading man (at one point, I felt they should switch roles!) La Stanwyck runs away to Monte Carlo. There she starts living the high life with a tough, sexy racing driver (Richard Conte). Given the fact that she has only a few weeks left to live, I thought this was eminently sensible behaviour on her part. Ah, but her heart is calling her back to Niven and his Alpine clinic...

The Other Love is spectacularly well-made by unsung director Andre de Toth, and boasts a luscious Tchaikovsky-esquire score by Miklos Rozsa. But it's success is down to Barbara Stanwyck, who lends a much-needed note of toughness and reality to what would otherwise be a pure camp melodrama. Played by anyone else, our heroine would most likely drown in syrup long before succumbing to a weakness of the lungs.

If you ever wished Barbara Stanwyck had starred in Dark Victory, rent The Other Love for your chance at recasting the Hollywood classic. In this romantic drama, Barbara has a serious lung condition and has to abandon her career as a famous concert pianist to heal in a Swiss sanitorium. It's not long before she falls in love with her doctor, David Niven, but is he hiding the seriousness of her illness from her?

Barbara Stanwyck gives an excellent performance in this overlooked film. She usually portrays very strong, independent characters, so whenever she breaks down and cries or begs for help, it's truly heartbreaking. Get ready to be heartbroken more than once during this film. I like Barbara anyway, but I was particularly impressed by her range of emotions: fear, anger, resentment, love, relief, hope, and determination. Ladislas Fodor and Harry Brown's script wasn't the strongest element in the film, and I could imagine another actress would have either been too flat or too melodramatic. Barbara is very real.

In addition to the medical portion of the film, Barbara is also caught in a love triangle, torn between David Niven and Richard Conte. While I love The Niv, Richard Conte is very magnetic. One man knows her past, and the other could be her future; one keeps up a professional front, and the other is overtly passionate. Which will she choose? Find out by renting this romance on a cold, rainy afternoon.

I was actually pretty much impressed by this story -- with its clever prefiguring, scenes of idyllic beauty, happiness, and jarring chills as abrupt as any horror movie, its music and raging against the dying of the light -- right up until it hits the last few scenes, which somehow strike a false note. Perhaps it's because my sympathies have a tendency, whether in sob-stories like this or in fluff as light-hearted as 'An American in Paris', to veer towards those third parties whose own affections serve only as a momentary derailment to the course of True Love. Perhaps it's my own experience of watching such illness play out its rapacious course, and knowledge of the futile health myths of the era. But after the touch of ice that runs through the rest of the film, the grand finale strikes me as a cop-out.

From a medical point of view it does occur to me to wonder how many modern viewers will realise from the start what's supposed to be going on! The dread opening words 'Swiss sanitarium' are no longer a universally-recognised shorthand for the unnamed spectre of tuberculosis, the cancer equivalent for sentimental sagas of the era. But it is, of course, tuberculosis requiring all those chest X-rays, mountain air, and 'stimulating diet'...

The story is skilfully constructed along the lines of a murder-mystery, lulling the viewer into security for long stretches of time, arousing sympathy and indignacy at a regime that can deprive Karen of her music as well as her liberty and her mobility. Celestine's constant light malice on the subject of Dr Tony -- jealousy or realistic view? -- stirs up additional doubt, and her role turns out to have a much greater significance than we were led to believe. Questions of truth or lies run like a twisting theme throughout the greater part of the film, keeping the audience off-balance, and making Karen's ultimate reaction of discovery easier to comprehend. (Again, though, I do wonder if modern viewers will realise that in medicine of the period, deceiving patients for their own good was no misdemeanour but more or less expected!)

By and large, I found this film much more sophisticated than one might expect from a genre piece of this nature. I've already mentioned the elements that verge unexpectedly on horror amid the sweetness, and the innocent establishment beforehand of items that will later prove significant. Celestine is not what she may appear. And Clermont, too, is not the opportunistic cad first appearances might lead us to assume.

My main problem is that it seems to turn a corner into a quite different sort of film in the last few minutes, for no very convincing reason. Given its previous record in this line, I was anticipating some kind of apocalyptic revelation right up until the final shot... and was left still hanging there, waiting, when the film proved merely to have ended. It felt like a simplistic resolution to what had previously proved a complex structure. And, I think, it turns the story into one about the heroine learning her lesson rather than one about her fierce passion for life -- and thus, for me, making her a less appealing character. Despite everything, the cruise might have been the better option...

David Niven and Barbara Stanwyck were both actors of quality, but they share absolutely no chemistry together in this sudsy melodrama about a concert pianist with TB. The rugged Richard Conte, a racing driver with a taste for the high life, is a much better fit for Stanwyck's screen presence, but isn't really given enough time to make his mark. Naturally, Stanwyck looks gorgeous throughout, despite her life-threatening illness...

Women's films, as they were called in the '40s, seldom offered a star a more glamorous way of leaving this world than THE OTHER LOVE, with BARBARA STANWYCK checking herself into a Swiss sanitarium to be treated for tuberculosis and promptly falling in love with her young doctor, David NIVEN against a background of Alpine beauty.

Stanwyck has got to be the healthiest patient in Hollywood history and she gets even more glamorous as she moves toward impending doom. So does the music by Miklos Rozsa. And as if one leading man isn't enough, the script has her leaving the safety (and boredom) of the clinic to go chasing after a tough motorcyclist (RICHARD CONTE) for one last fling.

It's syrupy romance straight from the pages of a Cosmopolitan magazine story--but no, in this case, straight from the pages of a novel by Erich Maria Remarque, who gave the world ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, but also turkeys like ARCH OF TRIUMPH.

Stanwyck's fans will be too busy admiring her wardrobe to view the plot with any skepticism at all, but others might find it just a little too pat and contrived, even for this genre of pulp romance.