The Purchase Price (1931)
There are two great actors here--Barbara Stanwyck of course, a great young star in the young talkie era, and George Brent is excellent in his steady, manly way, a good counterpoint to Stanwyck's lively edge. Then there is a clever twist of a plot, where one woman switches places with another, kind of (I'll let you find out how), and so the movie is a funny dramatic farce. It's quite funny in small ways all long, little excesses (the woman in their fancy coats pigging out in the train is a treasure).
Too bad the plot is so thin it couldn't be rescued.
What starts in New York and makes a pitstop in Montreal eventually ends up in North Dakota. (Maybe this is where Stanwyck got the idea that she liked doing westerns!) You might get tired of the hick clichés after awhile, but Stanwyck, of course, is no hick, and she more than anyone keeps it going through all the quacks and country idiosyncratic.
How then does a sophisticated and somewhat wayward city girl, a singer and philanderer, get along on a wheat farm in the hinterlands? You might only guess too easily.
Director William Wellman has to struggle a bit to make this one work, and he doesn't seem to have a feel for this kind of comedy (though he would later pull off "Nothing Sacred"). For one thing he leads Brent astray into an exaggerated type that doesn't suit him. The situation is practically a pre-screwball comedy with an unlikely couple at odds from the start, and some sexual tension turned to madcap comedy. It just isn't madcap enough--the weird location is meant to supply some of the absurdity. And the so-called tensions between Brent and his rivals (there are lots of them for the attractive Stanwyck, is seems) don't add up to much.
This one isn't much worth the trouble with so many fabulous Stanwyck dramas from this same period to go to first.
There are two great actors here--Barbara Stanwyck of course, a great young star in the young talkie era, and George Brent is excellent in his steady, manly way, a good counterpoint to Stanwyck's lively edge. Then there is a clever twist of a plot, where one woman switches places with another, kind of (I'll let you find out how), and so the movie is a funny dramatic farce. It's quite funny in small ways all long, little excesses (the woman in their fancy coats pigging out in the train is a treasure).
Too bad the plot is so thin it couldn't be rescued.
What starts in New York and makes a pitstop in Montreal eventually ends up in North Dakota. (Maybe this is where Stanwyck got the idea that she liked doing westerns!) You might get tired of the hick clichés after awhile, but Stanwyck, of course, is no hick, and she more than anyone keeps it going through all the quacks and country idiosyncratic.
How then does a sophisticated and somewhat wayward city girl, a singer and philanderer, get along on a wheat farm in the hinterlands? You might only guess too easily.
Director William Wellman has to struggle a bit to make this one work, and he doesn't seem to have a feel for this kind of comedy (though he would later pull off "Nothing Sacred"). For one thing he leads Brent astray into an exaggerated type that doesn't suit him. The situation is practically a pre-screwball comedy with an unlikely couple at odds from the start, and some sexual tension turned to madcap comedy. It just isn't madcap enough--the weird location is meant to supply some of the absurdity. And the so-called tensions between Brent and his rivals (there are lots of them for the attractive Stanwyck, is seems) don't add up to much.
This one isn't much worth the trouble with so many fabulous Stanwyck dramas from this same period to go to first.