La Manière forte

Ida Lupino plays the ruthless, ambitious, domineering sister of Joan Leslie in "The Hard Way."

The film starts with Lupino attempting suicide by jumping off a bridge, and the resulting story is one big flashback. Unhappily married in an ugly industrial town, Lupino sees a way out for herself and her sister, played by Joan Leslie, when two vaudevillians, Jack Carson and Dennis Morgan, come into town.

Carson soon is married to Leslie and Lupino joins everyone on the road, beginning her path of destruction to make way for Leslie in the big time.

Ida Lupino does a terrific job, as does the entire cast, including a wonderful appearance by Gladys George. Leslie is fresh and young but no phenomenal musical talent, so one has to attribute Lupino's drive to her success! A very good Warners Bros. Offering.

Greatly enjoyed this 1942 film starring Ida Lupino,(Mrs.Helen Chernen) who was married to a man who worked in a coal mine and Helen took care of her younger sister, Katie Chernen,(Joan Leslie). Helen hated the town they lived in and also her husband and wanted a bigger and better future for Katie. Katie met up with Albert Runkel, (Jack Carson) who worked on the stage as a song and dance team with Paul Collins, (Dennis Morgan). Katie has a great singing voice and can dance and Albert falls in love with her and gets her into his act. However, behind the scenes is Helen who is scheming to get her sister into big time show business and decides to get her sister married to Albert and runs off and leaves her husband and goes away with her sister and Albert. This story is really about the great actress Ginger Rogers and how her mother pushed her daughter into show business at all costs. They even offered Ginger Rogers a part in this picture, but she refused. Great Classic film, don't miss seeing it on TV.

This is a very enjoyable film, with a terrific central performance from Ida Lupino. But there are times when she seems to be working harder than she needs to, so that we see her acting. This is not surprising given the very light-weight performance given by Joan Leslie. Ida has to work very hard to get anything out of her. It's a shame, because I think a great actress in the Leslie role might have turned this film into an unforgettable exploration of sisterhood. Just imagine someone like Anne Baxter or Susan Hayward in the role. The really laughable sequence is the musical number that launches Leslie to stardom. It's a horrible piece of choreography and a very ordinary song, and the routine climaxes in Leslie doing some truly ridiculous cartwheels, that would have made her the laughing stock of Broadway. Instead she is the toast of the town, and a top playwright immediately offers to write a play for her! The climax of the film is also very silly, as anyone who has worked in the theatre would know. The actions of Morgan and Leslie here are completely unbelievable.

There are shades of ALL ABOUT EVE in THE HARD WAY - although the dialogue lacks the wit of Mankiewicz. It's good to see Carson and Morgan playing more meaty roles than usual - they were both top notch performers. But the best performance in the film is given by the wonderful Gladys George, who plays an ageing stage star manipulated out of her lead role by Lupino, to be replaced by Leslie. She is funny, touching and utterly convincing in a powerhouse cameo - can't imagine her doing those cartwheels though!

Rarely seen these days, and unavailable on tape, THE HARD WAY is a melodramatic gem, vaulted by five strong performances. True, the beginning looks as if we are going to watch 'Mildred Pierce', and, true, the ending is totally false if you know anything about the theater at all. Despite the script's weaknesses, this is a film to see, and I am glad that I have been able to obtain a copy. Ida Lupino is excellent as the grasping, obsessive, manipulative elder sister who pushes her younger sibling into show biz prominence. Lupino won the N.Y. Film Critics' honors but, surprisingly, was not nominated for an Oscar. It is a strong performance that, perhaps, needs a little shading here and there. Joan Leslie has an even more demanding role, however, in that her personality and growth is altered throughout the film. She is exquisite even though, as it often was in films of the 40's, the show-within-a-show sequences really are weak. Leslie's career ended because she was essentially blacklisted after she sued to get out of her Warner Bros. contract. (She had been considered to be the lead in 'The Constant Nymph' so some saw her emerging talents!). Jack Carson is remarkable, as he would be later in such films as 'The Tattered Dress'; Dennis Morgan gives his best acting work; and Gladys George, in a cameo, is wonderful even though it is evident the character is out-of-focus in terms of the way in which Broadway works (she never would have been given just one song in a revue). Vincent Sherman's direction is uniformly good in that it often leaps over plot contrivances and zeroes in on the performances. Leslie's acting abilities would be wasted until she free-lanced in REPEAT PERFORMANCE, BORN TO BE BAD (a better look at Broadway), and others. THE HARD WAY remains a forgotten and generally fine film.

This was an exceptional film--one that nearly earned a 9 and the deciding factor for me were the musical numbers which actually seemed to sometimes get in the way of the exceptional plot and acting. While this film was quite the coup for a young Joan Leslie, the real star of this film was Ida Lupino and this might just be her best performance. She plays an amoral and conniving woman who will do just about anything to make her younger sister (Leslie) a star--even use nice people like Jack Carson and Dennis Morgan to make it big. The fact that the script is so unrelenting in its way that it shows the depths to which Lupino would go made this a real standout film. Many other films of the day would have tried to soften her character more or give her a shot at redemption towards the end--a big mistake had they chosen to follow the typical formula of the day.

Aside from Lupino, the other standout actor in the film seemed to be Jack Carson, as his character had much more depth and was much more sympathetic than the usual brash character he played. Also, while their acting wasn't a huge standout, Morgan really belted out some excellent songs and I was surprised to see Leslie dance as well as she did (though I wonder if it really was her doing all the flips--you CAN'T see her face and it could have been a double).

Good, gritty entertainment--it's well worth a look.