Baby, yes, wedding ring, no: Lupino's sad, sad story
To dismiss Not Wanted (alternate title: Shame) as a dated glimpse into the socio-sexual mores of the bad old days is to forget how revolutionary it was. Ida Lupino one of the first women to make the break from glamorous stardom into the male preserve of directing co-wrote and co-produced this movie about what we would now call single motherhood but was then whispered about as illegitimacy. (Tellingly, though Lupino took a reportedly large hand in directing as well, she spurns the credit, leaving it to Elmer Clifton.)
Sally Forrest plays a scatterbrained young woman who can't even remember to bring home duct tape for the leak her dad's trying to fix or potatoes for mom's stew. She slings hash by day but at night dreams moonily of a lusher life, as represented by the hot piano-man at a night club (Leo Penn). She throws herself at him, and he catches (his flicked-away cigarette drifting slowly down a stream encodes their rapture). But, footloose and fancy-free, Penn packs up to try his luck in that provincial Paris, Capitol City. In a huff, Forrest packs up, too, and follows him there, only to be brutally blown off.
She takes a job as a gas jockey at a station managed by lame veteran Keefe Brasselle, but resists his tepid approaches at first (scant wonder: he plies her with his model trains.) But joining him at an amusement park, she swoons; a doctor called in diagnoses her as pregnant, much to her surprise. Without a word to her family back home or to Brasselle, she packs up yet again and checks herself into The Haven Hospital, a home for either (take your pick) unwed mothers or wayward girls. Much as she'd like to keep the baby, it's an unworkable option, so she grudgingly gives it up for adoption. But soon she's wandering the streets eyeing other women's babies a little too loonily. Next, the police are involved....
A more or less `happy' ending undoubtedly the only condition under which the picture got made at all can't compromise Not Wanted's unblinking look at what pregnancy without a wedding ring spelled for women who proved less than vigilant about their chastity. It's a compassionate (if melodramatic and sentimental) assault on a complacent mind-set that, disrupted by the exigencies of wartime, was striving to reassert itself (and strives still). Whatever else may be said about single parenthood, it's no longer a cause for scandal and indignation. Lupino can take at least a little of the credit for that.
Sally Forrest plays a scatterbrained young woman who can't even remember to bring home duct tape for the leak her dad's trying to fix or potatoes for mom's stew. She slings hash by day but at night dreams moonily of a lusher life, as represented by the hot piano-man at a night club (Leo Penn). She throws herself at him, and he catches (his flicked-away cigarette drifting slowly down a stream encodes their rapture). But, footloose and fancy-free, Penn packs up to try his luck in that provincial Paris, Capitol City. In a huff, Forrest packs up, too, and follows him there, only to be brutally blown off.
She takes a job as a gas jockey at a station managed by lame veteran Keefe Brasselle, but resists his tepid approaches at first (scant wonder: he plies her with his model trains.) But joining him at an amusement park, she swoons; a doctor called in diagnoses her as pregnant, much to her surprise. Without a word to her family back home or to Brasselle, she packs up yet again and checks herself into The Haven Hospital, a home for either (take your pick) unwed mothers or wayward girls. Much as she'd like to keep the baby, it's an unworkable option, so she grudgingly gives it up for adoption. But soon she's wandering the streets eyeing other women's babies a little too loonily. Next, the police are involved....
A more or less `happy' ending undoubtedly the only condition under which the picture got made at all can't compromise Not Wanted's unblinking look at what pregnancy without a wedding ring spelled for women who proved less than vigilant about their chastity. It's a compassionate (if melodramatic and sentimental) assault on a complacent mind-set that, disrupted by the exigencies of wartime, was striving to reassert itself (and strives still). Whatever else may be said about single parenthood, it's no longer a cause for scandal and indignation. Lupino can take at least a little of the credit for that.
- bmacv
- Jun 17, 2004