Primrose Path **** (1940, Ginger Rogers, Joel McCrea, Marjorie Rambeau, Henry Travers, Miles Mander, Queenie Vassar) – Classic Movie Review 6721

The risqué 1940 romantic drama film Primrose Path stars Ginger Rogers as young Ellie May, who meets a man (Joel McCrea) who agrees to marry her but does not know about her unsavoury family background.

Co-writer/ producer/ director Gregory La Cava’s risqué 1940 romantic drama film Primrose Path stars Ginger Rogers, then aged 29, who gives a winning performance as Ellie May Adams, a dark-haired teenaged daughter plagued by her unsavoury family background. Ellie Mae is living in the family shack in a post-Depression shanty-town on Primrose Hill, a bad part of town outside San Francisco. The film’s message, stated in a quote at the start, is ‘we live not as we wish to, but as we can’.

Ellie May meets Ed Wallace (Joel McCrea), who agrees to marry her, but what he does not know, because she has hidden the truth from him, is that her mother Mamie (Marjorie Rambeau) is a prostitute and that her father Homer (Miles Mander) is an alcoholic.

Writers Gregory La Cava and Allan Scott, adapting the play The Primrose Path by Robert L Buckner and Walter Hart and novel February Hill by Victoria Lincoln, are forced to tiptoe very carefully around because of Hollywood’s strict censorship rules at the time, (e g mother both has a heart of gold and has to meet an unhappy fate), but they cook up an intriguing fusion of realistic shanty town atmosphere and boy-meets-girl fairy tale romance.

The attractive and compelling performances of the stars, as well as Rambeau and Mander as the parents, Henry Travers as Gramp and Queenie Vassar as mean-spirited Grandma, do the rest. Rogers makes an uncanny success of playing a late-teenager, as she did in The Major and the Minor (1942). Rambeau was Oscar nominated as Best Actress in a Supporting Role in an indication that they succeeded in tiptoeing around the censorship rules successfully, though the film was banned in Detroit. Also the public liked it and it made a profit of $110,000.

Primrose Path is directed by Gregory La Cava, runs 92 minutes, is released by RKO Radio Pictures, is written by Allan Scott and Gregory La Cava, is shot in black and white by Joseph H August, is produced by Gregory La Cava, is scored by Werner R Heymann, and is designed by Van Nest Polglase and Carroll Clark.

Also in the cast are Joan Carroll, Vivienne Osborne, Carmen Morales, Gene Morgan, Lorin Raker, Charles Lane, Mara Alexander, Herbert Corthell, Larry McGrath, Jack Gardner, Jack Gargan, Edgar Dearing, Nestor Paiva, Jacqueline Dalya, Lawrence Gleeson Jr and Ray Cooke.

Seven years earlier Ginger Rogers and Joel McCrea previously starred together in Chance at Heaven (1933).

The Primrose Path play opened at New York’s Biltmore Theatre on 4 January 1939 and ran for 166 performances.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Classic Movie Review 6721

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