Scandalous Carole Lombard is hustled out west to the family ranch to avoid another scandal in New York. Ranch hand Gary Cooper's contemptuous indifference to her incites her to make him fall in love with her. Trouble is, she falls in love with him, and marries him, which gets her disowned. Such is the sexual heat that she doesn't care, until a hard year of deprivation getting his ranch started sends her back to a life of luxury in New York, asking for a divorce by letter.
I looked for signs of Soviet class struggle in Marion Gehring's first movie for Paramount, from a novel by Mary Roberts Rinehart and with Slavko Vorkapich as "associate director" -- I guess he was doing his usual amazing montage work on this. I didn't find it, but a story of co-dependence, two individuals, neither of whom can do anything worthwhile alone, but together can accomplish something, set in that glossy Paramount world in which of course they fall in love, because they're beautiful. They're also pretty good at not understanding what it is they mean to each other until it's explained to them. Gehring got good performances out of them, just as he later would out Sylvia Sidney.
In many ways, this movie reminds me of Warner Brother's THE PURCHASE PRICE the following year, which I think is a superior movie. Perhaps that is because in this movie, the leads' love turns out to be much more selfish. I suppose that's a case of Your Mileage May Vary. Certainly, Stanywyck is at least as good an actress as Lombard is and Cooper is better than Brent in the other movie.
I looked for signs of Soviet class struggle in Marion Gehring's first movie for Paramount, from a novel by Mary Roberts Rinehart and with Slavko Vorkapich as "associate director" -- I guess he was doing his usual amazing montage work on this. I didn't find it, but a story of co-dependence, two individuals, neither of whom can do anything worthwhile alone, but together can accomplish something, set in that glossy Paramount world in which of course they fall in love, because they're beautiful. They're also pretty good at not understanding what it is they mean to each other until it's explained to them. Gehring got good performances out of them, just as he later would out Sylvia Sidney.
In many ways, this movie reminds me of Warner Brother's THE PURCHASE PRICE the following year, which I think is a superior movie. Perhaps that is because in this movie, the leads' love turns out to be much more selfish. I suppose that's a case of Your Mileage May Vary. Certainly, Stanywyck is at least as good an actress as Lombard is and Cooper is better than Brent in the other movie.