My Forbidden Past

Ava Gardner was TCM's Star of the Month last month, and that gave me the chance to see one of her films that I hadn't watched before: My Forbidden Past. I'm glad I watched it, but not for the reasons the studio would have wanted back in the day.

Gardner plays Barbara Beaurevel, a young belle in turn-of-the century New Orleans. The movie starts off with having a torrid but illicit relationship with Dr. Mark Lucas (Robert Mitchum), who is some sort of research scientist at Tulane University. Mark is about to go to South America for a couple of months on a research expedition of some sort that's not explained, and he'd like Barbara to go with him and perhaps they can get married down in South America or even on the ship since the captain could perform the ceremony.

Of course, there's a catch. Barbara doesn't have any money, even though she lives in one of those grand old houses that the antebellum upper crust of New Orleans lived in. And it's not even her house, but that of her aunt Eula (Lucile Watson). Eula lives there with her son Paul (Melvyn Douglas), and the two of them most definitely don't approve of Barbara's relationship with Mark, him being a northerner to boot, oh the scandal. Barbara plans to elope, but Paul catches her packing her bags, and blackmails her into staying, writing a letter to Mark instead telling him she can't go and that she'll marry him when he gets back.

Of course, any sane viewer would recognize that Paul isn't about to let Barbara out of the house to deliver that letter, and that when he himself offers to deliver it, you know he's delivering it straight to the circular file. But Barbara doesn't get this, and won't be able to understand why Mark, upon his return, thinks Barbara jilted him.

Before that return, however, two things happen. One is that Mark marries the first reasonably good-looking American woman he meets in Latin America, returning to New Orleans with a wife Corinne (Janis Carter) in an entrance that surprises Barbara when she goes to the boat to meet Mark. The other is that a lawyer comes to the Beaurevel house looking for Barbara. Apparently Barbara had a grandmother with the forbidden past of the title, being engaged in some sort of activity that Eula finds so shocking that one doesn't even mention the name of this woman. (I think the family tree would require this to be Barbara's maternal grandmother, because otherwise it would be Eula's mother-in-law. In fact, since Barbara and Eula share a surname but the dead woman doesn't, that would make it the mother-in-law of Eula's brother-in-law.) The last member but one of that line of the family recently died out in California, leaving Barbara as the closest living relative, and set to inherit almost a million bucks, which is quite a sum of money for 1900.

Eula and Paul don't want Barbara to take the money, because everyone will find out where the money came from and this will somehow make the family's social status go down the drain. Barbara has the understandable idea that she doesn't want to be poor any more, and takes the money. And when she finds out a few months after that Mark has gotten married, she comes up with a plan to use that money to get Corinne out of the way.

If the movie wasn't ridiculous enough before that, it's about to get a whole lot more ridiculous, and that's why I enjoyed the movie. This is supposed to be some sort of serious melodrama, but everything is more like an absurdist comedy, even though that's decidedly unintentional. Mitchum is badly miscast, while Gardner does the best she can with the material. Watson is pretty good as the evil matriarch, if not to the level that Madam Konstantine was in Notorious. And Melvyn Douglas looks like he went back and rewatched Mildred Pierce so that he could learn to play the slimy, smarmy schemer role that Jack Carson so brilliantly portrayed. I don't know that Douglas got to play too many roles like this, and he runs with it for all it's worth.

As a serious picture, My Forbidden Past isn't all that good. But as unitentinal comedy, it's a blast.