I've mentioned before how MGM was one of the top studios in the pre-TV era of Hollywood, but also how certain types of movies didn't really work at MGM because the studio seemed incapabale of making a movie not be glossy. Another movie that I think fits into that mold is the melodrama A Life of Her Own.
The movie starts off with Lily Brannel James (Lana Turner) taking a taxi in her small city (I'd call it a small town, but the buildings are too big for that) to the train station to catch a train to New York City where she's bound to make it big, and everybody in town knows it. Or at least, that's the sort of town it is. In the next scene, Lily is already in New York, sitting in the waiting room of the modeling agency run by Tom Caraway (Tom Ewell). She has to wait a while to get Tom's attention, but he does hire. Coming into the office at the same time is veteran model Mary Ashlon (Ann Dvorak), whose career has passed its peak.
The two wind up going out on the town together that night, making it a double date with lawyer Jim (Louis Calhern) and ad exec Lee (Barry Sullivan). Mary has too much to drink and winds up back in her upper-floor apartment with Lily, chewing Lily out on the grounds that Mary thinks Lily is trying to take her boyfriend away from her. The next morning, Lily walks into the office to hear all the other models talking about the news that Mary has killed herself by jumping out of her apartment window!
Since Lana Turner is the star of the movie, we know that she's going to make it as a model; as she starts to climb the ladder of success, she's accompanied by Jim, who sort of takes Lily under his wing. Meanwhile, he has a client, Steve Harleigh (Ray Milland), who is a copper miner from Montana and visiting New York on business reasons. Steve and Lily spend time together on a purely platonic basis since he's already married and realize that they can never have a real relationship even though they do start developing feelings for each other. So they part as friend when Steve goes back home.
Except that business is going to bring Steve back to New York, and this time he's even unhappier than he was the first time he was in New York. Steve may have fallen out of love with his wife Nora (Margaret Phillips), but then we learn what really happened between Steve and Nora: the two of them got in a car accident that was Steve's fault but it was Nora who wound up an invalid. To make matters worse, Nora decides to come out to New York since she hasn't seen him in a while and his birthday is coming up. Lily is the one who's going to be left out. Or will she make Steve and Nora confront the truth?
Part of the problem with A Life of Her Own is that it's the sort of melodrama that would have been better suited to Warner Bros. instead of MGM, where everyone can't help but be a bit too high-class for the material. But another part of the problem with the movie is that it was made while the Production Code was still utterly in effect. The material here really needed to be handled differently, but any of the ways to make it work better would have run up against the Code Office. (Indeed, reading up on the movie, the Office had issues with earlier drafts of the screenplay.) The cast tries hard, and it's not as if the movie is bad by any means. It's more that it's not quite right.
Still, A Life of Her Own probably deserves being seen in part to see how the Production Code could screw up a movie and in part for the professionalism of all involved.
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