Dust Around the Blossoms

I mentioned this morning not having seen any of this years Best Actress nominations. So instead, I'll mention a movie that garnered a Best Actress Oscar nomination ages ago: Blossoms in the Dust.

Greer Garson plays Edna, née Kahly, a young woman living in Wisconsin with her parents and sister Charlotte at the turn of the last century. She's set to get married, as is her sister, but two things happen. One is that bank teller Sam Gladney (Walter Pidgeon) meets her and vows to marry her, even though he's not her fiancé. The other is that Charlotte's past as an adoptee, making her -- [whispers] -- illegitimate -- and certain her fiancé won't marry her.

Sam is planning to start a business milling wheat in Texas, and starts writing to Edna, a correspondence that turns mutual and results in her getting married to him and leaving for Texas, and they live happily ever after.

Well, no they don't because all this happens in the first 20 minutes of the movie. Edna has a kid, but the kid dies aged about 4, leaving the couple childless. A woman is going to have to give up her kid for adoption, but Edna is so moved by the possibility of this that the decides to do what she can to turn the Gladney house into a day-care center for those women who have lost their husbands or never had husbands, making them able to work at the mill.

But the mill goes bust, forcing the Gladneys to move from rural Texas up to Fort Worth. Sam is working his ass off to pay his debts and try to come up with a new process of milling wheat that would be more efficient an profitable. He sends Edna to the courthouse with the papers to file for a patent. While there, she passes by the juvenile court, which has so many cases of childless children that the State has to tag them to keep track of the kids. This bothers Edna, who decides to take two of them in.

From there, two grows and grows, until Edna is running a moderate-sized adoption agency. But she knows, in part from her own step-sister, the stigma that children born out of wedlock faced at that time, so she also starts a cruse of getting the word "illegitimate" stricken from birth certificates. The old biddies hate the idea, when they really should have been fighting against the subsidies from the biggest sugar daddy of them all, the state, that have since the implementation of the Great Society enabled multiple generations of families to have no fathers whatsoever, with all the concomitant social problems.

But I digress. Edna continues her work, and even leads to a fair amount of destigmatization of children born out of wedlock. But she's still always wanted children of her own, and is even beginning to think about adopting one child, shutting down her adoption agency, and moving back north....

Blossoms in the Dust is based on a true story, as Gladney was a real person, but as is always the case in Hollywood biopics, facts are changed and moved around for dramatic effect. The movie is competently made and in nice Technicolor, but one thing you do have to know is that the stars are Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon, and this is MGM. That means there's a certain style, that, combined with the sort of "family-friendly" material we're dealing with, may come across as too syrupy at times for many viewers (myself included). Felix Bressart is quite good in his supporting role as a pediatrician, but this is Garson's movie all the way, especially after Pidgeon's character dies.

The TCM Shop lists Blossoms in the Dust as being available on a four-movie box set but not a standalone DVD. Amazon has the same box set, and has the movie available streaming if you can do that.