Primrose Path

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.

The novel upon which this is based centers on the mother figure, but the Broadway play and film version instead emphasize the growing pains of the oldest daughter. RKO has cast Marjorie Rambeau as the mother and Ginger Rogers as the daughter.

The story is told in simple, straightforward fashion. We glimpse the young woman's desire to break away from a cycle of poverty, as well as attempts to distance herself from her mother. Life changes dramatically when she embarks on a romance with a local restaurateur (Joel McCrea), but due to a set of circumstances beyond her control, she finds herself following her mother's path as a prostitute.

While this is largely a vehicle for Rogers' talents, it is Rambeau that gives a most extraordinary performance as the one whose choices catch up to her in dramatic fashion. Rambeau previously played a destitute mother forced into sin in MGM's Min and Bill, and in this picture, she is revisiting familiar emotional territory.

Rogers and McCrea previously costarred in Chance at Heaven, also for RKO.

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.

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 entire production, from beginnng to end, was to me letter perfect. The story, the actors, all of the dialogue and the realistic performance was magnificient. One actor in particular, that being Joan Carrol, stood out above all else. She was truly a scene stealer! What a gem!