La flamme qui s'éteint

The most interesting part of this singular film is the co-acting between Margaret Sullavan and Viveca Lindfors. They both love the same man, and Viveca is intent on leaving him not knowing that his wife Margaret is dying, while Margaret is intent on leaving her family to her after her death. They are rivals but very sympathetic and find each other, and Viveca also has a tragedy behind, having lost her husband in the war after too short a marriage, and somehow they find each other in their mutual fathomless sorrow and sadness.

The story is not remarkable. It's an ordinary melodrama in the style of Douglas Sirk, Margaret thinks she is crowning her family happiness by at last having another child, and hopefully a son, when the doctor tells her otherwise. She forces him to tell her the whole truth, which is that she only has six months left to live. She decides not to tell her husband (Wendell Corey), but although he gets mixed up with the lovely Viveca, who is employed as his assistant, he decides that Margaret and their daughter (Natalie Wood) mean more to him than Viveca, without knowing his wife is dying.

This is a rather ordinary sob story, but Margaret Sullavan turns it into something much more advanced by her heart-rending acting, which is totally sincere and almost unbearably convincing all the way. Your heart will bleed for her, and you will sob throughout the film, if you are human. Only she knows what she is up to, while the others just carry on, believing she is on as well, and her doctor plays a key role as he knows the whole truth and has to stand by her without any power to do anything. To all this comes the very prudent and delicate score by George During which gradually transcends into Brahms (1st symphony, last movement), which eventually gives the film something of an apotheosis of the kind that Frank Borage used to excel in, who made several of Margaret Sullavan's best films. She is forgotten today, but all her films stand out still, and she was actually married to Henry Fonda to begin with. This was her last film and in some ways both her most personal and typical.

No Sad Songs For Me expresses what Margaret Sullavan wishes when she learns she has terminal cancer. She thinks she's pregnant, but that's the verdict from her doctor John McIntire. Her problem is now how best to arrange her life's final months.

She'll be leaving behind husband Wendell Corey and daughter Natalie Wood. And Sullavan has an interesting problem on her hands in the person of Viveca Lindfors, a new employee for her surveyor husband. There's a growing attraction between them and normally that would call for claws to come out. But Sullavan is thinking of Wood as well and face it Lindfors is a nice person who's not doing anything to encourage Corey.

As for Wendell he's behaving like a perfect gentleman, but the signs are there.

This is a fine and literate adult drama about a woman facing terminal illness and looking to make the best of it for herself and her family. Sullavan who mostly played tragic roles on screen gives her farewell big screen performance in No Sad Songs For Me. She did do television and stage work until her suicide in 1960.

In fact all the members of that screen family ended badly. Natalie Wood drowned way too young and Wendell Corey became a misanthropic alcoholic who died too young of liver cancer. Read Kirk Douglas's memoir The Ragman's Son to find out about how Corey's career turned bad.

But in this film all the players give strong performances and the film never turns maudlin. That final shot with Lindfors and Wood with Sullavan's shadow looming over them is unforgettable.

No actress during the golden age of Hollywood handled death with more soulful dignity than Margaret Sullavan, an actress unjustly forgotten even though she gave peerless performances in MGM classics like Frank Borzage's "Three Comrades" and Ernst Lubitsch's "The Shop Around the Corner". This modestly budgeted 1950 sudser was her last film, a decade before her own untimely death from a drug overdose. This was one of only sixteen Sullavan made since she preferred acting on stage rather than celluloid, which was a shame since she was utterly sublime no matter what the vehicle. In this appropriate swan song, Sullavan plays Mary Scott, a suburban wife and mother who learns too late that she is dying of cancer. Director Rudolph Maté holds the camera on the veteran actress for long takes as she reacts to this news.

Maté lets her mercurial moods dictate the tone of the film and allows Mary to find a way to die in the most mature way possible. This is where the insightful screenplay by Howard Koch ("Casablanca") rates a cut above similar-minded soap operas. Witness the adult way he has Mary deal with her husband Brad's infidelity and her pragmatic approach in setting up Brad's assistant-turned-mistress, a serious-minded Norwegian draftsperson named Chris, as her successor in the family. While Mary's selflessness is likely to look excessive by contemporary standards, Sullavan brings such an affecting combination of pathos and intelligence to her character that she transcends the innate limitations of the material, including a few predictable turns like a high-speed drive on a deserted highway and a comically drunken scene in an all-night diner.

She even has a couple of moments where she gets to recreate famous dramatic cues from "Three Comrades" such as her irritation at the ticking of an alarm clock and her valiant struggle to get out of bed. Character actor Wendell Corey does a fine job as Brad as does Viveca Lindfors ("The Way We Were") as early feminist Chris, although their affair is severely downplayed to appease 1950 censors. At 11, Natalie Wood was still five years away from "Rebel Without a Cause", but she manages to play Mary and Brad's precocious daughter with aplomb. The film has a low-budget look about it, but it doesn't take away from Sullavan's artistry which is on full display here. To the strains of Brahms' "Symphony no. 1 in C minor", the last scene packs the necessary emotional wallop even though you know the film's outcome from nearly the beginning. There is a newly remastered print on the 2011 DVD release.

Well-heeled wife and mother in her forties, feeling run-down and believing she might be pregnant (!), learns from her doctor she only has ten months left to live; she keeps her secret from her husband and daughter, and doesn't interfere when her spouse gets eyes for another lady. Adapted from Ruth Southard's novel by Howard Koch, this is an infuriating undergraduate of the "Dark Victory" school of script-writing. Solely for the sake of melodrama, Margaret Sullavan's harried housewife begs her doctor to tell her the truth, but doesn't extend the same courtesy to her own husband (Wendell Corey, who instead asks over and over if she's all right, all the while with a pained expression on his face). Strictly a 'woman's picture' of the time, with a magazine serial-styled plot. Some of the dialogue confounds one with its absurdity, and Sullavan is far too efficient and business-like for a one-woman pity party. Natalie Wood skips through the movie in old-fashioned print dresses and braids, but Viveca Lindfors gets the worst of it in the obtuse role of a war-widow who begins to feel like a woman again when she's out with a married man. ** from ****

I fail to see how the movie was sexist or racist considering the timeframe. In fact, the movie shows a woman can perform well in a position tradionally held by men. Only recently up into the 70s were women being comepletely accepted in male dominated positions. Only recently were MDs required to give honest brutal but truthful information to their patients. They would withold some information if they felt is was beneficial to their patient. As far as patient confidentiality goes. HIPAA was not around then and a husband just as entitled to know about his wife's medical condition as she was. As far as a husband developing an affair with a coworker. Where and when does that not take place today? In fact, this movie may have predicted a complication of coed workforces that were not too common back then. It doesn't take much of a brain and a tiny bit of history to understand the setting of this movie. Now speaking from a medical professional, I can say the death was a little too clean for a person dying of cancer, but back then showing such misery and horror was frowned upon. Look at how people died in war movies back then. She would have shown progressive weight loss, signs of anemia, growing weakness, etc. But, even now I see people who seem to be doing fine, get hospitalized and are dead within a week or two. In the end, the movie was one of the pioneer movies to address the depressive and taboo subject of dying of cancer, something really only as recent as the late 60s and early 70s was able to be more open about. Though it is not a classic tearjerker, it is a sad and depressive movie about the real threat of carncer and I would recommend it to classic movie buffs and those wishing to study how Hollywood tackled death and dying in the films.