The Major and the Widow

A movie that ran duing Summer Under the Stars that I hadn't seen before is My Reputation. It's available from the Warner Archive scheme, so I DVRed it and watched it.

Barbara Stanwyck plays Jessica Drummond, a woman in World War II Chicagoland living with two sons who has recently become a widow. Thankfully her husband was exceedingly wealthy before the illness that killed him, because he was able to leave her and the kids financially secure. The kids can still go to boarding school, and Jessica can do Red Cross work for the war effort. But there are other issues.

One is that the boys are growing up (after all, they're old enough to go to boarding school in New England) and developing interests of their own that are leaving Mom increasingly alone, despite the fact that she had a large social circle. More distressing for Jessica is her frankly nasty mother Mary (Lucile Watson). Jessica's mother insists that, like all upper-class people in proper society, Jessica needs to mourn in the right way, which means wearing black and a veil in perpetuity and apparently liking it. Mary's been wearing the veil for 25 years.

Jessica has a couple of nice friends in the Abbotts (John Ridgely and Eve Arden). They have to go to California for business and then plan to rent a cabin near Lake Tahoe for a time, so they invite Jessica alone. She thinks the change in scenery would do her good, although her mom insists Jessica go south with her. (I told you she was a piece of work.)

Jessica is supposed to enjoy the early winter weather in Lake Tahoe, but she's a lousy skier who breaks one of her skis so she has to trudge back to the cabin. Thankfully, she meets a nice man who is willing to help her back to the cabin. Scott Landis (George Brent) is a Major in the US Army, doing some sort of service stateside for the time being. He takes Jessica back to the cabin, and they spend an evening together with the Abbotts. As you can guess, they develop a friendship.

But for Jessica, it seems a bit more than a friendship. When she learns that Maj. Landis has been transferred to Chicago, she jumps at the chance to see him. He warns her that he's not the marrying kind, and that he's liable to be transferred overseas any minute now, but she continues to carry on. Her mom is of course pissed off by it, and even all of her friends other than the Abbotts start a vicious gossiping campaign. Can Jessica and the Major live happily ever after?

My Reputation is the sort of movie I had all sorts of problems with, mostly because I don't think I was the target audience for it. The movie was made in 1943 at the height of the war, but held back for release until 1946, so I'd presume the original intended audience was women whose husbands were away. But the bigger problem I had with the movie is that Jessica could have solved her problems with a little honesty. She could have just had a friendship with Landis and told everybody she was shoing him a bit of Chicago while he was stationed here alone. And with the patriotic war fervor, why would anybody have a problem with a widow being kind to a soldier?

I can't really fault the acting, although it was odd to see a script leave Eve Arden strangely subdued. But the plot and the character motivations it gave its characters just drove me bonkers. Still, you may be the sort of person this movie was designed for, and especially if you like Barbara Stanwyck you might like it.