Cinema: Suffering on Silk

Back Street (Universal-International).

In her classic cautionary tale of extramarital love, Novelist Fannie Hurst took an exciting peep at the eternal triangle from the other woman's angle, then primly told her readers what, in 1931, they primly expected to hear: it is the man who plays and the woman who pays. But the passing years have made some changes in the sociology of adultery. In this third film version of the book—Ross Hunter's full-color, widescreen. $2,500,000 overproduction in which the bathrooms look like the lobby of the Beverly Hilton—the fallen woman falls, not into the pit of shame, but into the lap of luxury. She still suffers, but on silk.

As a poor country girl from Nebraska. Susan Hayward meets John Gavin, a rich city boy from Chicago, falls in love, finds out that he is married, runs away and becomes a famous fashion designer. When the handsome devil finds her again, he is revealed as anything but a gay seducer; he is in fact the all-American archetype of the mother's boyish male, a muddle husband with an alcoholic, homicidal wife (Vera Miles). Adultery thus spectacularly excused, massed violins take over and sweep the lovers away to a villa drowsing in jasmine by the passion-tossed Tyrrhenian, to a rose-covered cottage in the meadowy environs of Paris. "Just be with me whenever you can," she croons, as the finches twitter in the flowering plum, "and I'll be happy the rest of my life." Ah, but when he cannot be with her, she tastes the bitterness of what the ads call "borrowed love." One solitary Thanksgiving Day she calls home to Nebraska and, hearing all the dear familiar voices and the happy clatter in the kitchen, sobs into the phone: "S-save the w-wishbone for-me!"

Fate, alas, gives the heroine the short end of that wishbone. Hounded by the heartless censors, her lover dies in a highway accident, surviving just long enough to reach a telephone and gasp into the mouthpiece—sure enough—those three little words. To the Kleenex corps, each one of them will be worth a bushel of Bermuda onions.