The Purchase Price

This 1932 film by William A. Wellman is an entertaining mixture of comedy and melodrama. Barbara Stanwyck, who made many pictures with Wellman, stars a New York nightclub singer. She hopes to marry a rich young man, but her disreputable past scotches things. Wellman adds a nice touch to the breakup scene when through the window we can see a truck picking up garbage.

Stanwyck wants to get away from the Damon Runyon-esque crowd she runs with in New York, and moves to Montreal. But stooges of the racketeer who fancies her track her down. She makes an impulsive decision to swap places with the hotel maid, who used Stanwyck's picture in a matrimonial arrangement with a North Dakota wheat farmer.

The rest of the film finds Stanwyck trying to adjust to the hardships of farm life with her new husband, George Brent. He is pleased to find that she looks like the picture she sent (which of course was sent by the maid), but when she slaps his face and bars him from the bedroom on their wedding night, he descends into a permanent funk. She grows to love him, though, and even tries to entice him to bed by laying out her frilliest nightgown (no doubt this was the "Forbidden" part of this pre-Code film). Eventually she helps him save the farm and presumably it's happy ever after.

As I said, the tone of this film varies wildly. At many times it seems to be a comedy, as there's lots of slapstick, but then it veers into melodrama, especially with a scene in which Stanwyck visits a woman who has just had a baby, her husband having run off. This scene shows the harshness of prairie life, and has an interesting performance by a teenage Anne Shirley as the woman's older daughter. The uneveness of tone could be a problem, but I didn't mind it, and in fact it made the film seem more authentic, as life is pretty much an equal mixture of comedy and drama.