TO EACH HIS OWN (1946)

Nearly all Hollywood Golden Age female stars played Unwed Mother sometime during their careers. (Loretta Young did it for real, going to Europe after an affair with Clark Gable on CALL OF THE WILD/’35, then returning with an ‘adopted’ girl.) This film, a superior example of the form, comes rather late in the cycle, but easily gets away with changing post-WWII mores by setting its instigating sin during WWI when glam flyboy John Lund (in an excellent debut he never quite lived up to), on a publicity swing, vamps hard-to-land local belle Olivia de Havilland only to find he’s suddenly gone serious on her . . . and vice versa. But since we all know the mortality rate for WWI flyers, and since the film is told as a WWII London-set flashback with de Havilland, now a tough-as-nails business mogul dashing off to meet the son she could never acknowledge (he’s a WWII flyboy much like Dad), the death is no big surprise. What does surprise is how intelligently it’s all laid out & played for us. By de Havilland, of course, Oscar’d for the role (note how smartly she plays middle-aged spinster, embittered rather than trembly white-haired & stooped), but also from Roland Culver as a titled, unlikely British suitor, along with a host of unsung Paramount contract players under unusually detailed, fluid period direction by the underrated Mitchell Leisen. Even the cute little boy who doesn’t know why ‘Aunt’ Olivia is so threatening, clinging and over-protective is better than you expect. Like the film as a whole.

DOUBLE-BILL: Mitchell Leisen also had John Lund in the far odder Unwed Mother film noir, NO MAN OF HER OWN/’50, from a Cornell Woolrich story, with pregnant Barbara Stanwyck taking advantage of a serendipitous train wreck to change her identify.