Le lys du ruisseau

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.

It was fun seeing Virginia McMath a.k.a.Ginger Rogers at age 29. As I watched this film on Turner Classic Movies I saw a resemblance and body language very much like Doris Day's. Bubbly!! I found the film interesting because here Hollywood was, back in 1940, handling the theme of prostitution which is handled quite differently today. I'd say in 1940 it was done tastefully compared to the trash we see today.

Joel McCrea was the same mild mannered, easy going type that made him famous while the film was stolen by meddlesome witchy Queenie Vassar playing Ginger's maternal grandmother and Miles Mander playing Ginger's highly intelligent has-been drunk father once well acquainted with Greek philosophy.

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 & Ginger Rogers star in this tale of a romance from across the tracks. Rogers lives in a ramshackle home populated by a ramshackle family who's matriarch is a lady of the night & the patriarch is a souse. When she meets McCrea, who is a go-getter working at a gas station slash hash-house, she thinks her financial woes are over & soon marries him but when the truth of Rogers' family come to bear, McCrea feels trapped & betrayed & acts accordingly (at least he thinks so). Mixing humor, pathos & romance in what could've been an unsavory package, this film finds the right note for the telling.

I thoroughly enjoyed the acting in this film: Ginger Rogers as the daughter of prostitute Marjorie Rambeau (an Oscar nomination), who supports the family; Joel McCrea as the man Rogers sort of ropes into marrying; Miles Mander as her educated alcoholic father, who can translate Greek but is otherwise useless and knows it; Queenie Vassar as her grandmother, an ex-prostitute who would rather see Rogers become a prostitute than settle down with McCrea; and the remarkable young child actress, Joan Carroll as Rogers' young sassy kid sister. Her rendition of the poem "Don't Swat Your Mother, Boys" was a hoot. When McCrea meets Rogers as she digs for clams, and steals a kiss (her first one) as he starts to gives her a lift home, she falls in love. That night she goes to see McCrea at the Bluebell Club and lies when she says she's run away and can't return, never mentioning her family for fear of alienating him. They marry, but of course the truth comes out eventually, creating a rift. The acting is so natural I felt as though I was looking into a window observing the lives of these people.

The word "prostitute" is never mentioned (it would have given the 1940 censors apoplexy), but it was obvious anyway. Still, the film was banned in Detroit, and the play was modified to placate those censors. Queenie Vassar was primarily a stage actress; this was her first film.