Saturday's Children (1940, Vincent Sherman) (Patreon)

46/100

Watched this as part of a John Garfield retro on the Criterion Channel, but he's cast against type here, as an ineffectual dreamer, and works so hard to avoid his tough-guy mannerisms that he pushes well past restrained into outright bland. Anne Shirley's vivacious enough to counteract that, to some degree, but she's stuck with original playwright Maxwell Anderson's conception of marriage as an institution imposed upon adventurous men by security-minded women—for the man's own good, we're ultimately meant to conclude, but there's only so much proto-Rules melodrama I can stomach. Should she confess to being pregnant, in an effort to keep him from running off and seeking his fortune in the Philippines? Or should she falsely deny being pregnant, lest he stick with her out of mere grudging duty? False binary, but the movie clearly does not recognize that, and this is one of those cases in which reminding myself that mores were different in 1940 doesn't help all that much. It's just too central. Some of the dialogue sparkles—especially in early scenes establishing Bobby, her extended family, and the office where she meets her future husband—and it's always gratifying to see a Depression-era film depict characters who are actually struggling to make ends meet (though Anderson wrote the play pre-crash, in 1927, and the U.S. economy had largely recovered by the time of this adaptation). Surprised the Hays Code allowed Bobby to wish aloud that she'd married some other guy, so that Rims* could be her exciting lover rather than her boring ol' spouse; not surprised that we get no other hint of infidelity, even as idle fantasy, when things go truly sour heading into act three. Just an attempted-suicide insurance scam that's conveniently foiled at the last possible second, followed by someone else's abrupt change of heart at the last possible second. Too saccharine by half.

* Has there ever been a real-life human by that name? It doesn't seem to be a nickname. Rims Rosson. Only in the '30s, even if it was technically ’27.