Forbidden

Another movie that I noticed was on Tubi but I think is leaving at the end of the month is a Barbara Stanwyck pre-Code that a search of the blog says I haven't blogged about before: Forbidden. And, having watched it, I don't think I'd actually seen it before. So now I do a post on it in order that you can see it for yourself before it leaves Tubi.

Stanwyck plays Lulu Smith, which is certainly an odd name for a Stanwyck character. Even odder is that as the movie starts, she's a small-town librarian of the sort that Donna Reed in It's a Wonderful Life would have been if Jimmy Stewart had never been born. Lulu, needless to say, doesn't much care for this kind of life. So she decides to cash in all the money she's saved up, get a makeover, and take a luxury cruise to Havana, this of course being decades before Communism.

However, you can't take the prim and proper out of the librarian, so on the cruise, Lulu keeps dining alone. One day, however, she goes to her cabin after dinner, and finds that somebody else is in there! And that somebody is... a man! A drunk man, no less, up-and-coming lawyer Bob Grover (Adolphe Menjou), who has thoughts about a career in politics. Lulu is surprisingly forgiving about this drunk crashing her cabin, so much so that she decides to have dinner with him. And then, when they get to Havana, she spends the entire vacation with him!

Back home, we see that Grover is a district attorney, put into office with help from the local scandal sheet newspaper. Editor Al Holland (Ralph Bellamy) is none too pleased with this, and decides he's going to work at derailing Grover's career. The only thing is, he doesn't really have any way to do this, at least not honestly. That's only because he doesn't know about Grover and Lulu.

Grover meets Lulu for Halloween, and each of them has a surprise for the other. Lulu got knocked up on that vacation to Havana, and she's about to tell Bob so that he can marry her and the two can live happily ever after and make lots more babies. Well, we're not far enough into the film for that to happen, so instead Bob has to break the terrible news to Lulu that he's got a wife Helen (Dorothy Peterson), except that she was badly injured in a car crash and is now an "invalid" (judging by the way she's able to walk, I'm guessing the only part of her body that got injured was her uterus). Because of the injuries, Bob can't divorce Helen.

Fast forward to the maternity hospital, where Lulu checks in as Jane Doe and has the baby, Robert. She finally comes up with a way to tell Bob about the baby, which is a plan to have the Grovers adopt the baby Roberta, and for Lulu to be the baby's governess. It's a wacky idea, and Helen puts the kibosh on it when she finds out that Lulu doesn't have any references -- frankly, that's not unreasonble on Helen's part, and she's not written as the villainess of this piece.

The villain is Al. Lulu, in need of a job, gets one as the lonelyhearts columnist at Al's newspaper, and then many years later winds up marrying him. Lulu has been scrapbooking Roberta's childhood, since Grover is prominent enough that Roberta gets in the society section of the papers. Grover's political career is coming along nicely, too, as he's in the running for governor. But Al finds out the truth about who Roberta's mom is, and he's got no compunction about using that information to bring Grover down.

Forbidden is one of those early 1930s melodramas that's got some interesting ideas. In fact, possibly too many of them for the movie's own good, since the movie on multiple occasians turns on a dime. It's fun, and thanks to the direction of Frank Capra, there are some nice visuals. The story isn't the best, however. On the bright side, all three of the leads do more than the best they can with the material such that its weakness doesn't seem like such a big deal.

Sure, there are better and more lurid pre-Codes out there. But Forbidden isn't bad, and it's absolutely worth a watch.