Frank Capra (1932)
At the start of Forbidden, the heroine Lulu Smith (Barbara Stanwyck) has a job in the reference library of a local newspaper. Violating long-established routine in a way that startles her colleagues, Lulu arrives for work late one morning. As she goes in, some kids outside call ‘Old mother four eyes!’ at her. Lulu sits at her desk. An elderly colleague asks, ‘Do you know what time it is?’ She replies, ‘It’s springtime’. (Stanwyck gives the words an intriguing, witty ambiguousness.) Then Lulu takes off her specs, goes to the bank to cash in her considerable savings and sets sail on a cruise to Cuba, during which she has a passionate affair with an urbane older man, a lawyer, called Bob Grover (Adolphe Menjou). (The affair begins thanks to confusion about the numbers of their cabins – she’s 66 and he’s 99.) The relationship continues when they return home but ends when Grover tells Lulu he’s married. His wife Helen (Dorothy Peterson) is an invalid and unable to have children but there are no such problems for Lulu, who’s now carrying Grover’s baby. Lulu is living alone, bringing up their daughter Roberta, when Grover re-enters her life and the affair resumes. Helen’s condition is unspecified beyond her having a walking stick but it means she keeps taking trips to Europe for ‘treatments’ at convenient points in the story. During one of these, the lovers decide that, as a surprise for his wife, Bob will adopt Roberta and Lulu will join the household as the baby’s nanny (although the word used us ‘governess’, which seems strange for such a young child). Lulu almost immediately finds the arrangement intolerable. She walks out on her infant daughter, who’s left to be raised by Bob and his newly-contented wife. But Lulu’s affair with Grover continues throughout the years of his progress up the political ladder – from district attorney to mayor to congressman to senator to governor.
After she’s left her child with Grover and his wife, Lulu returns to the local newspaper, this time as an agony aunt. She stays there for many years, all the time being pursued by Al Holland (Ralph Bellamy), a journalist who rises from cub reporter to editor and whose two abiding aims in life are to marry Lulu and to destroy Grover’s political career by exposing him for the crook Holland is sure that he is. When Grover himself, during his campaign for Congress, tells Lulu he can’t stand the pretence any longer, she finally consents to marry Holland, in order to protect Grover and Roberta, who is now a lovely young socialite. Holland discovers the truth; Lulu shoots him dead before he can expose it. She goes to prison but Congressman Grover abuses his political power to get the sentence commuted to a year. By this time, Grover is gravely ill. He calls Lulu to his deathbed and writes a new will, leaving half his estate to her. When he dies, Lulu leaves the house, walks down the street, crumples the will into a ball and throws it in a rubbish bin. She disappears into the crowd.
The programme note used by BFI suggested that Forbidden was one of the pictures that led to the enforcement of the Hays Code in 1934 and this isn’t hard to believe. Although the story of the ‘fallen woman’ was a staple of early thirties Hollywood melodrama, the treatment of Lulu is not at all censorious. Things don’t work out happily for her but that’s largely because she follows her heart in making decisions – not because Frank Capra determines that she be punished. Giving up her baby so that she can continue her liaison with the child’s father seems, even now, startlingly unconventional. Pre-Hays films really can be remarkably physically open (and expressive) – films like Mamoulian’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Capra’s The Bitter Tea of General Yen, which I saw just last week. You notice it here too, not just in what appears to be the morally sympathetic viewpoint of Capra, who himself wrote the story, and Jo Swerling, who did the screenplay, but in, for example, the reality of the interactions of Barbara Stanwyck and the baby Roberta (Myrna Fresholt).
Some of the plotting is pretty desperate. Holland, whose press career is driven by trying to get the dirt on Grover, is incredibly inept: in the course of two decades, he and his boys don’t manage to get a whiff of the affair with Lulu. Unless it’s love for Lulu that blinds him to the truth, it’s hard to believe that Holland doesn’t twig to the situation very early on – when he meets Lulu out with the infant Roberta and Bob’s car pulls up to collect them. When Lulu and Holland marry and he discovers the truth, the melodramatic scene that Stanwyck and Ralph Bellamy have to play undermines the amusing dynamic between Lulu and Holland that’s developed up to this point in Forbidden. The twenty-year time span of the story is reflected, and not reflected, in an odd way. The aging make-up for Stanwyck and Bellamy is OTT: she looks like an old woman at the end of the film. Yet the clothes and the social activities described suggest a continuous present (rather than starting in 1910 and leading up to the present, or starting in 1930 and projecting into the future).
On the plus side, there’s an impressively nuanced scene in Lulu’s apartment shortly after the return from Havana. Bob arrives, wearing a grotesque mask; after she’s let him in, Lulu wears one too. The masks enhance the comic business between Stanwyck and Menjou (and anticipate what’s to come) but the disguise, in his case, also expresses Bob’s concealment of his true self from Lulu: this may sound obvious but comes over as quite powerfully upsetting. The lovers lie together on a sofa. Lulu muses about Cinderella and her own fears that midnight is always about to strike and put an end to her happiness with Bob. The phone rings: it’s Holland asking if she’ll marry him. Lulu passes the receiver to Bob so he can listen in: I liked the fact that it’s this proposal that appears to trigger his admission that he’s got a wife. Jo Swerling’s dialogue is uninspired when it’s serious but excellent when it’s humorous. (Holland is the main beneficiary in this respect, although Lulu and Bob get some good lines too in the apartment scene.) Capra expertly choreographs the big political convention during Grover’s campaign for Congress.
Her performance here is another fine example of Barbara Stanwyck’s modernity. She shows you, with easy candour, both Lulu’s appetite and her getting on with her life straightforwardly – without melodramatic recrimination or brooding. Stanwyck is tremendous when she abandons the nanny persona: out in a rain-and-wind-swept street Lulu gives Grover a piece of her mind and storms off. Then she comes back. Stanwyck rather loses conviction when Capra asks her to be nobly self-sacrificing but Lulu shoots Holland with great passion, wanting not only to shut him up but to obliterate the years and years he’s been trying to get the man she loves. Ralph Bellamy plays Holland with a likeable enthusiasm and Adolphe Menjou’s Bob Grover is convincingly multi-faceted. You see a skilled operator, in his professional and his personal life. But, although it’s Lulu who sacrifices her future to his career, Grover isn’t without a conscience and has his own kind of loyalty to his mistress – even if it is of a self-serving rather than a self-denying kind.
11 November 2010
