Ma vie à moi

Lana Turner plays a woman who leaves her small town to go to New York to get into the modeling business.

It's a magazine-fiction type of story that is given some depth, intelligence, and color by George Cukor's direction.

Cukor does all sorts of nice things with the milieu, the supporting cast, the situations, and the performances of the leads, perhaps to obscure the fact that this isn't a very compelling story.

Predictably, Lana's character gets involved with a married man (Ray Milland). Her lover's long- suffering wife (Margaret Phillips) is bedridden. The man cares about his wife, but also about his girlfriend. He nearly goes off the deep end worrying about it all.

Ann Dvorak in a supporting role as an aging, bitter model steals the show, more or less, though a little of her (and her role) goes a long way. We also get to see Barry Sullivan, Tom Ewell, Jean Hagen, Betsy Blair, Richard Hart, Louis Calhern, and many others. The supporting cast is really great.

By the way, Ray Milland was a replacement for Wendell Corey, who reportedly was fired after making a snide remark when Lana was late to the set (for an apparently legitimate reason having to do with her wardrobe). Supposedly, Corey told Turner that Barbara Stanwyck (with whom he had recently starred) never kept a cast and crew waiting. Since there were rumors Lana had had an affair with Stanwyck's husband, Robert Taylor, the crack seemed especially pointed. At any rate, Lana refused to work with him after that.

A Life Of Her Own was one of two pictures produced by MGM's influential Voldemar Vetluguin, a former editor of Redbook magazine. The other was East Side, West Side (1949).

I'm not sure at what point Lana Turner went from being "The Sweater Girl" to super-sonic Drama Queen, but it certainly could have been around the time George Cukor's "A Life of Her Own" was released in 1950. Lily James (Turner) is a young woman from a small town who comes to New York based on a letter she received from a modeling agency owned by Tom Caraway (Ewell). Upon their first meeting, Caraway hires her, and she quickly gets schooled in the highs and lows of modeling, thanks to a fading fashionista with whom she becomes friends. Unfortunately, the friendship is short-lived when Lily's friend hurls herself out of her apartment window in a drunken fit of loneliness. Lily becomes a top model herself, and along the way becomes acquainted with a businessman from out of town, Steve Harleigh (Milland) that she meets through a mutual friend. Although Harleigh is married, the two cannot deny their connection and end up having a very intense affair. Unfortunately, Harleigh is caught in a rough position since his doting wife back in Montana is handicapped and in a wheelchair. The two must decide whether their love is worth pursuing until the bitter end, or if they should deny their feelings and let each other go.

In "A Life of Her Own", George Cukor, one of film history's most prolific and successful directors (The Philadelphia Story, Gaslight, My Fair Lady – just to name three) provides great melodrama without losing the integrity of the story. Unlike a lot of films from this genre, most of which I'd admit to really liking, I didn't find myself rolling my eyes and grinning during some of the most dramatic scenes; rather, I found myself completely drawn in to the plot, due partly to the character development and their portrayers. I really enjoy both Turner and Milland, and have seen where they can both just go out of control with the drama, but I didn't feel that way during this film one bit. To be sure, there are times that you have to suspend your disbelief. Turner was 30 when she made this film, and while she was incredibly beautiful, she was not a "fresh faced" kid who is going to take the modeling world by storm from the second she sets foot in New York. The reasons behind the attraction between Milland and Turner are a bit nebulous as well, but I felt they pulled off their chemistry convincingly.

Personally, I love the lush Technicolor melodramas of the 1950's, and short of the great Douglas Sirk, this is almost as good as it gets. 7/10 --Shelly

Lana Turner heads an excellent cast in "A Life of Her Own," a 1950 film directed by George Cukor. Its other stars are Ray Milland, Louis Calhern, Margaret Phillips, Barry Sullivan, Tom Ewell, Ann Dvorak, and Jean Hagen.

Both the beginning of the film and the end are the best parts; the in between is incredibly slow. Turner plays a young woman from Kansas who comes to New York to break into the modeling business. She meets what could be her future if she's not careful: a washed up, alcoholic, desperate has-been, beautifully portrayed by Ann Dvorak. No need to tell you what happens there - you've seen it a million times.

As her career progresses, Turner meets a married millionaire, Steve, played by Ray Milland. She knows he's married and it starts off platonically enough. But, as we learn what seems like hours later, he's a lot more than married.

This is a great cast, right down to the smaller roles, which includes Phyllis Kirk, one of my favorites, and Hermes Pan, who so often worked with Fred Astaire on choreography.

Turner is excellent and has some fine dramatic scenes; Milland is handsome and sympathetic as her boyfriend. Margaret Phillips, as his wife, does a marvelous job, and Tom Ewell is a joy. Actually, everyone is very good.

Alas, there's not much of a script here and you know what's going to happen along the way. The very end shows Cukor's directing mastery. Given what he had to work with by way of a script, it's a very well done movie. I shudder to think what it would have been like in someone else's hands.

Kansas girl makes a splash in New York City as a print model, but her love affair with a married man may ruin her. From the era where independent career girls were only ambitious until a man entered the picture, this "woman's movie" is naïve and rather unconvincing, though it is seldom soft; the knowing dialogue has a sharp, bitter edge, and the performances are solid, making it a cut above the usual soap opera. Isobel Lennart's screenplay is dotted with cutting little truths--too many, perhaps; often, the greedy masochism is underlined with a moral conscience (and tinkling piano keys) which turns the whole thing into a heavy-breathing melodrama for sufferers on the high road. Lana Turner does a lot of striding up and down, and she seems too seasoned to be a novice in the film's opening scenes, but her desperate gaiety is touching. Ray Milland does his usual colorless nice-guy turn, but Ann Dvorak is startling playing an over-the-hill model and Margaret Phillips (as Milland's wife--an invalid who beams with sanity and understanding like a saint) is excellent in the film's big scene, where the two women meet. Not an important picture, nor a provocative one, but a star-vehicle that does manage to touch upon some resonant truths about women, their careers, and their fragile hearts. **1/2 from ****

Never a good idea when making a movie to kill off your best character twenty some odd minutes in. Referring, of course, to the unhappy, aging, neurotic, dipso model played to self destructive, sardonic perfection by Ann Dvorak. When she throws herself out of a top story apartment window a lot of the quality and all the energy of this film goes with her. Did you notice, for example, how Isobel Lennart's dialogue, so sharp and insightful when Dvorak is around, turns mushy and labored? And how George Cukor's directorial pacing seems to be off a tic or two once Ray Milland (rhymes with bland) and his dull love interest character enters the picture? Gone is the breezy tone of the first fifteen minutes when Lana Turner's character gets a crash course from Tom Ewell in Modeling 101 and the tension inherent in the nightclub scene with sleazy Barry Sullivan, Dvorak, Turner and nice but not too nice Louis Calhern.

Bottom line: It's not the worst Cukor film ever made (that dubious distinction goes to "Chapman Report") but we're a long way from "Adam's Rib" or even "The Actress", for that matter. Give it a C.

PS...Milland as a copper baron from Montana is about as convincing as John Wayne playing a librarian.