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"All the way or zero with me," as Dreyer's Gertrud would say, thus from "toniest girl in Cincinnati" to longing shadow. The heroine (Irene Dunne) enjoys casual romance until she falls for the budding financier (John Boles), he's engaged, the clandestine rendezvous sets the pattern for the decades ahead. His mother's approval might save the relationship, the arranged introduction at the park concert is missed as the maiden comforts her distraught stepsister. (She arrives to dispersing crowds, dwarfed by a reverse track before the vacant bandstand.) Paths crossed in New York, "I finally tore you out of my mind, and now you've come back to torture me." So it goes for years, partings and reunions accumulated into oblivion, Fannie Hurst's masochism boiled into a bitter distillate by a most rigorous lens—there are Wyler's "severities" about which the very young Godard wrote, and then there's John M. Stahl. Limbo of the Other Woman, her married lover travels across Europe while she waits in a muggy flat to the sounds of construction jackhammers. Quiet surfaces and combustible recesses, the door at the bottom of the stairs swings open to reveal a neighbor on fire. "There isn't one woman in a million who's found happiness in the back streets of any man's life," she tells a fellow mistress, then he materializes and she forgets her own warning. The "fine, steady" suitor (George Meeker) comes and goes, the next generation (William Bakewell) heaps shame before reaching compassion. The aching couple on the luxury liner with their backs to the camera, split by a phone off the hook, reunited in an alternate reality envisioned with a dying breath. "I wonder..." Naruse's As a Wife, As a Woman has a different angle on the bleak ménage. Cinematography by Karl Freund. With ZaSu Pitts, June Clyde, Arletta Duncan, Shirley Grey, Doris Lloyd, Paul Weigel, Jane Darwell, Walter Catlett, James Donlan, and Robert McWade. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |