Anita Loos, who gave us Lorelei Lee in GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES and Jean Harlow’s raciest lines, must have hung her head in shame over this treacly bio-pic. Worse, she knew the damn thing worked. It’s all about noble Edna Gladney (Greer Garson), a personal tragedy magnet, she loses a foster sister, a child, a business fortune, fertility and a husband as she moves from Wisconsin to Texas, opening a newfangled Day Care Center for Tots of Working Mothers which morphs into a child-placing orphanage/adoption service and then a civic campaign to remove the stigma (even the term) of illegitimacy from official state records. Overburdened in M-G-M house style, over-dressed sets, pudding rich TechniColor (for Garson’s flaming tresses), Mervyn LeRoy’s stultifying corporate direction, it adds Walter Pidgeon, in his first turn as Garson’s consort, an unlikely Texas entrepreneur, while Ernst Lubitsch regular Felix Bressart adds a little bounce as a doctor from the wrong side of the tracks. The portrayals of black servants are simultaneous less insulting and more condescending than usual, with pretty maid Theresa Harris made up far darker than she appears in other pics. (Max Factor ‘Blackamoor?’*) Garson finally shows a bit of selfish self-pity at the end, but rights course for an uplifting curtain. Dramatic cotton-candy spun from lead.
DOUBLE-BILL: Against expectations, Garson & Pidgeon (in the third of eight pairings), again with LeRoy directing, hit similar emotional buttons without making you hate yourself in the morning on MADAME CURIE/’43, a follow-up bio-pic helped by a fine Paul Osborn script.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Darkening up black actors wasn’t unusual at the time (and the TechniColor process necessitated odd tints), but rarely so extreme. Directly below, two shades of Theresa Harris.
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