Hopelessly mired in depression after a personal tragedy (will she ever love again?), Barbara Stanwyck is reluctantly coaxed back to life by rich, older suitor Frank Morgan, stubbornly pursuing her with his offer of companionate marriage. But embers of passion flare up once she meets Ricardo Cortez and now it’s Morgan’s turn to fall into a hopeless depression. This circular drama, the only Willa Cather novel turned into a movie during her lifetime, exhausts itself after a brusque, effective prologue, with director Alfred E. Green reverting to autopilot. The acting isn’t exactly bad (Lyle Talbot rather good doing unrequited gentlemanly love and Cortez weirdly glib & unsympathetic as Babs' hot new love), but the script can’t find a pulse in the material, sleepwalking its way to resolution. Something Cather may have noticed since she never sold anything else to Hollywood. (Though was it this production or the silent version of 1924 with Irene Rich that turned her off?)
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Someone must have hit the replay button on ‘The Very Thought Of You’ for the monotonous soundtrack.
WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: This was Stanwyck’s first ‘Post’ Hollywood Production Code release and almost any of her ‘Pre-Codes’ would make a better choice. Especially those early Frank Capra beauties THE MIRACLE WOMAN; FORBIDDEN/’31 or THE BITTER TEA OF GENERAL YEN/’32.
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