This old friend of mine is definitely a pre-code movie, with its hints of rape, a casual attitude towards marriage, and the drunken charivari that accompanies the unconsummated marriage. Barbara Stanwyck's past with gangster Lyle Talbot puts the kibosh on her upcoming marriage to Hardie Albright. She can't go back to being Talbot's mistress, so she heads up to the back end of nowhere: Canada. Even that isn't far away enough for Talbot not to have her spotted, so she flees as a mail-order bride to Canada's wheat belt, and George Brent with a perpetual head cold. But Brent is so casual and insistent, that she repulses him. Yet just as she can't go back to her old life, Miss Stanwyck comes to take an interest in Brent's work, the rough-hewn town, and eventually Brent himself.
Brent is not so good in his role, but Stanwyck really shines as a woman finally growing up. The charivari is amusingly done, and the hardscrabble life of a farmer is well indicated, with a slam-bang fire to end the proceedings. With a script that borrows liberally from THE WIND, Miss Stanwyck offers something thst Lillian Gish could not: the portrait of a woman who has lived as a sexual creature, but has tired of it.
Brent is not so good in his role, but Stanwyck really shines as a woman finally growing up. The charivari is amusingly done, and the hardscrabble life of a farmer is well indicated, with a slam-bang fire to end the proceedings. With a script that borrows liberally from THE WIND, Miss Stanwyck offers something thst Lillian Gish could not: the portrait of a woman who has lived as a sexual creature, but has tired of it.