Primrose Path

After Ginger Rogers scored so well in a serious drama like Stage Door, the brass there were less reluctant to give her substantial parts. Ginger gives a great performance in Primrose Path, a good lead into what would be her Oscar winner with Kitty Foyle that same year.

The play by Robert Buckner and Walter Hart is based on a most steamy novel February Hill by Victoria Lincoln. February Hill was apparently the God's Little Acre of its day, it's steamy sex scenes had to be toned down considerably for the stage and even more so for the Code driven cinema of 1940. The novel and play were set in my area of the country, Buffalo and later out near Lake Canandaigua which is a considerable distance away.

In toning down the sex the screenwriters also switched the location to Northern California and with that making Primrose Path look a whole lot like John Steinbeck's work and characters. But no matter how you slice it, no denying that Ginger's white trash family make their living with prostitution, a low class version of Leslie Caron's family in Gigi.

Ginger thinks there's something better out there and her mother Marjorie Rambeau encourages her in that. She meets up with a nice, low key owner of a gas station and greasy spoon restaurant down the road in Joel McCrea. He's better than some of the low life men who her mother and grandmother would you believe consort with. He's also a lot better package than her own father, the alcoholic Miles Mander.

Primrose Path doesn't age well for today, it's a case of the Code seriously compromising the nature of the material. If it were remade today we'd see a more frank version. The players do fine with their roles and Marjorie Rambeau got an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress, but lost to Jane Darwell for The Grapes Of Wrath.

Try and think of who you might cast in a remake today of Primrose Path. I could see Brendan Fraser in Joel McCrea's part myself.