A Different Time-Barbara Stanwyck’s My Reputation

DVD Review

By Zack James

 

My Reputation, starring Barbara Stanwyck, George Brent, 1946

 

Sometimes film, especially older films like the one under review Barbara Stanwyck’s My Reputation can act as a slice of social history of a time when mores were different, when what was proper in gentile society and why were different. Take the background issue where; what is a lovely younger widow to do with her life in society once her husband is gone at a young age. Today with the six million possible living arrangements and live and let live attitude among many sectors of the population the way this film played out, maybe even the fact that the question had even been posed would seem to be something out of a social archeological dig.

Still it is interesting to see how the situation played out so here is the skinny. Jess, played by Barbara Stanwyck in a not very memorable role in like say Double Indemnity, a proper high society recent widow with two sons is expected by her social peers and a nose-out-of-joint mother to burn herself on the pyre of her love for her late husband who by all accounts was a good guy, a good dad too. But Jess brought up in the straight and narrow high society world of Chicago and never having a previous chance to blossom decided that she would step out a bit, get a new fellow maybe but not endlessly grieve over her late husband. Eventually through the good graces of friends who takes her with them on a vacation in ski country she meets a Major Landis, played by George Brent, who is both charming and unattached. The rest of the film revolves around their growing attachment, their intentions toward each other and the fact that with a war on who knows what will happen in this cockeyed world. That and then the kids, two young but growing boys who are still attached to their father’s memory and who balk at anybody else coming into their lives-sound familiar.

Of course along the way plenty of eyebrows are raised, plenty of eyes are rolled as Jess almost escapes from the social bonds that chain her to that leafy suburban existence that she knows too well is suffocating her. She learns a hard lesson on who your friends are but also that in a lot of ways she was stuck in her upbringing which meant that her boys had to come first-and then see what would happen if the good Major got back from the war in one piece. They called this film a ‘tear-jerker’ back then,  a melodrama, but today it couldn’t be made because nobody would believe that a young good-looking woman with kids, or not, wouldn’t be out on the hustings looking, well, looking for something. A nice period piece though .