Primrose Path

source: Primrose Path

The Primrose Path was originally produced as a play in 1929 and ran on Broadway for 9 months. It went on the road for @ 10 years. Then it came back and was made into this film. The lead character in the play was originally male and was rewritten for the film with Ginger Rogers. It was based on a "Tobacco Road" situation and a book entitled "February Hill" by Victoria Lincoln. Much was changed for the play and further changes were made for the film. It was Robert L. Buckner's first of 6 or 7 plays. The acting is quite well done especially the role of the father. Costumes and scenery are also quite accurate and apropos.

The above quote is how this excellent melodrama starts, at it really sets the tone for the rest of the film. "Primrose Path" does a fantastic job of illustrating the lengths a person can be driven to out of sheer desperation. Ginger Rogers' acting in this film is hard to put into words. It's simply perfect. Her portrayal is at once completely natural, yet incredibly nuanced. Two scenes, in particular, when her husband leaves and when her mother dies, are excellent examples of acting at its best. Another of Rogers' films, "Kitty Foyle", released the same year, garnered more attention, mainly because it was a based on a hugely popular book, while "Primrose Path" was highly controversial. Personally, I think Rogers should have won the Oscar for this film, instead of "Kitty Foyle". I highly recommend "Primrose Path". However, be forewarned. While there is no outright violence or sex, this is not a family film, as it deals with very adult themes, such as poverty, alcoholism, and prostitution.

This is such an unusual film. You've got a girl of unnameable age (Ginger Rogers as Ellie) who is apparently old enough to get married but young enough to pull off looking twelve or thirteen merely by dressing the part and putting her hair in pigtails. Why would she put on this ruse? She gives several excuses but it's probably seeing the effect of men on the lives and characters of her mother and grandmother. Mom is currently a prostitute supporting a husband for which she feels obligation but no longer love. Ellie has an alcoholic father who apparently is long on education but short on the stuff that enables people to face up to life, and knowing how and why his wife makes a living as she does just deepens his cycle of alcoholism. Then there is grandma that takes the cake but would never be caught baking one. She's a retired prostitute and loves talking "shop" with her daughter, Ellie's mom. So of course Ellie would never want to cross the threshold to adolescence. And then one day she meets diner worker Ed Wallace (Joel McCrea). Unable to tell her true age, Ed partly kids with her and partly flirts. In Ed Ellie sees what she has never found at home - someone with humor, who makes her laugh, who - not knowing her family - accepts her. In Ellie, Ed sees a freshness and sense of naiveté he can't find in his cannery row dates at the café, even though he seems to enjoy their bawdiness. So here we have a couple in which both parties are of equivalent classes as far as income, but worlds apart in where that income originates. Romances are common from this era in which one party is hiding a past that they think will disrupt the relationship if it is discovered. This one is different because it is the girl's family that is of ill repute - the girl herself has done nothing wrong with one exception - she basically tricks Ed into marrying her by telling him a pack of lies about her fictitious strict family. It's a very heart-warming film, not overly melodramatic, and has fine performances from all the supporting cast as well as Rogers and McCrea who display great chemistry despite the fact that their characters' romance appears to come out of nowhere. Plus it has a quite unlikely hero in the matchmaker who reconciles the young couple - one highly insightful "John" who maybe really did love Ellie's mom after all, knew what she was up against, and didn't want to see history repeat itself in her daughter. I highly recommend it.

this version(the only one I have seen) takes place in the fishing industry of Monterey California. It not only takes place in the famous stomping grounds of John Steinbeck but is as interesting as many of his stories such as Cannery Row and Tortilla Flat. Like a good Steinbeck story it about the poor and the very poor. The lower working class that struggles to survive and the even less fortunate. Ginger Rogers' family is made up of the even less fortunate.A kind mother who sells herself to keep a roof over their head and at the same time takes care of an alcoholic husband. Well acted by real troopers of the early thirties and well worth watching. Snappy dialogue and some wonderful shots of Montereys' scenic coast are an added plus. The Blue Bell Cafe is mentioned often in this film and was an actual popular establishment in the town of Monterey.

After a decade after scoring in comic and musical roles, Ginger Rogers moved onto dramatic parts with her Oscar Winning role in "Kitty Foyle" and this artistic sleeper which shows her dramatic side to equal zeal. She is a poor girl whose father is a drunk and whose mother is an aging prostitute. Untrustful of men, she disguises herself as a teenager, but after an afternoon with the happy-go- lucky Joel McCrea, she changes her tube, her looks, her demeanor. But even as a happily married woman, she can't escape her family history, and an encounter between McCrea and her clan leads to his disgust and trouble in paradise. Marjorie Rambeau received much praise for her performance as Rogers' mother, an aging glamour girl who is in an unhappy marriage and tries to escape the wretchedness of her existence with monetary favors from other men. She goes from tough to tender to winsome and regretful with little ease. Queenie Vassar threatens to walk away with the picture as Rambeau's crude mother, a very miserable creature whose actions have lead to everybody's misery. The lovable Henry Travers offers warm wisdom as the restaurant owner who encounters Rogers and calms her wariness by saying, "I'm just an old hunk of buzzard bait." By mixing comedy into the drama (the typical Ginger wise-cracks), this reveals the restlessness of this family and reveals the sadness underneath. Rogers and McCrea are a gorgeous couple. I can see why this mo not have succeeded because it can be rather depressing at times. But it is closer to reality than many films of the time and really touches the heart.

Ginger Rogers is a tough kid just out of high school who wears pigtails and mannish clothes and comes from the ironically named Primrose neighborhood -- all shacks and ditches and dusty roads. She runs into Joel McRead, an ordinary guy who works and lives at the gas station in town, and they spend a day digging clams at the beach. She tells him nothing of her background, and they gradually fall for each other. And what a family she has! Mother is savvy enough in her own rough-hewn way. The little sister is cynical and ill mannered. Father -- the reliable Miles Mander -- is an educated drunk who is always about to write the definitive history of Ancient Greece on a diminutive table using a handful of books from the library. Grandma caps them all. She hates anything soft, anything that is redolent of romance or of any emotion but dislike. She teaches little sister poems with titles like, "Don't smack your Maw." Rogers runs away from home and surrenders to McRae on the pier behind the Blue Belle Saloon. She signals her sacrifice by fainting dramatically in McRae's arms. (The good man hold her slack body and he looks around, wonderingly, as if puzzling over what to do next.) Anyway, they're married and Rogers happily works behind the lunch counter at the gas station -- staying as far away as possible from the Primrose Path -- but McRae pushes it and Rogers finally takes him to meet her family, which turns out to be a disaster. It's basically a depression story, though released in 1940. Everybody is poor -- except maybe Ma's frequent interludes with variously named "Uncles." The Depression Play must have been a popular genre at the time. "Dead End" was a big success on the stage, although it seems schematic now on the screen. Double negatives and "aint"s abound in the dialog and the expression "You'd better had" appears regularly. It's also a romantic drama and not entirely convincing. McRae is a sensible character but he believes the lies that Grandma tells him rather than the well-intended and even charming fantasies that come from his new wife. It's unworthy of him. I kept wondering too what kind of town this is. It's obviously not a city. It's more like Cannery Row or Pismo Beach than anything else, and yet the working-class McRae and the down-and-outers of Primrose Path have remained strangers to one another all their lives. Fortunately, it ends happily, although a gun shot wound is involved and Pa remains a dipsomaniac. Well, it will all work out, now that Rogers and McRae have come to terms with the limits of her background.

"Primrose Path" is actually a rather daring film for its day. Young Giner Rogers has grown up in a home with a rather disgusting grandmother, an alcoholic father, and a mother who seems a bit loose. In reality, although it's not too obvious, grandmother and mother were prostitutes. Quite by chance, Ginger Rogers meets Joel McCrae and they soon realize they are in love and they get married. But, Rogers hides her family from McCrea due to her embarrassment. But, sooner or later McCrea has to meet them, and when he does it's a disaster and he dumps his wife because of all the lies, despite the fact that they were happy together (along with McCrea's father, who lives with them...played by Henry Travers). Eventually they realize they still love each other, but only after tragedy hits the family and Rogers nearly becomes a prostitute herself. Marjorie Rambeau, who played the mother, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for this film. Miles Mander, who plays the alcoholic father, is excellent. Queenie Vassar as the grandmother...well, I was not impressed, but perhaps it was her role that was so disgusting. Henry Travers...excellent and perfect, as always. A small, but interesting role in the film is Charles Lane, who plays a likable "John Smith" who hires Rogers as his "date", but ends up getting the two lovers back together. Usually he plays a skinflint, but here he is rather likable in a very different role. This is really a very good and under-appreciated film. The topics were racy at the time, but really come together well, and there is plenty of social commentary here, as well. Highly recommended.

It was fun seeing Virginia McMath a.k.a.Ginger Rogers at age 29. As I watched this film on Turner Classic Movies I saw a resemblance and body language very much like Doris Day's. Bubbly!! I found the film interesting because here Hollywood was, back in 1940, handling the theme of prostitution which is handled quite differently today. I'd say in 1940 it was done tastefully compared to the trash we see today. Joel McCrea was the same mild mannered, easy going type that made him famous while the film was stolen by meddlesome witchy Queenie Vassar playing Ginger's maternal grandmother and Miles Mander playing Ginger's highly intelligent has-been drunk father once well acquainted with Greek philosophy.

After Ginger Rogers scored so well in a serious drama like Stage Door, the brass there were less reluctant to give her substantial parts. Ginger gives a great performance in Primrose Path, a good lead into what would be her Oscar winner with Kitty Foyle that same year. The play by Robert Buckner and Walter Hart is based on a most steamy novel February Hill by Victoria Lincoln. February Hill was apparently the God's Little Acre of its day, it's steamy sex scenes had to be toned down considerably for the stage and even more so for the Code driven cinema of 1940. The novel and play were set in my area of the country, Buffalo and later out near Lake Canandaigua which is a considerable distance away. In toning down the sex the screenwriters also switched the location to Northern California and with that making Primrose Path look a whole lot like John Steinbeck's work and characters. But no matter how you slice it, no denying that Ginger's white trash family make their living with prostitution, a low class version of Leslie Caron's family in Gigi. Ginger thinks there's something better out there and her mother Marjorie Rambeau encourages her in that. She meets up with a nice, low key owner of a gas station and greasy spoon restaurant down the road in Joel McCrea. He's better than some of the low life men who her mother and grandmother would you believe consort with. He's also a lot better package than her own father, the alcoholic Miles Mander. Primrose Path doesn't age well for today, it's a case of the Code seriously compromising the nature of the material. If it were remade today we'd see a more frank version. The players do fine with their roles and Marjorie Rambeau got an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress, but lost to Jane Darwell for The Grapes Of Wrath. Try and think of who you might cast in a remake today of Primrose Path. I could see Brendan Fraser in Joel McCrea's part myself.