Back Street (1932)

Back Street
Directed by John M. Stahl
Written by Gladys Lehman and Lynn Starling from a novel by Frannie Hurst
1932/USA
Universal Pictures
First viewing/YouTube

[box] Ray Schmidt: I know myself so well – it’s all the way or zero with me.[/box]

Irene Dunne gives heart to this top-drawer melodrama.

Fun-loving Ray Schmidt (Dunne) is playing the field around the turn of the last century when she falls hard for rich, handsome Walter Saxel.  It just so happens that he is engaged.  On the day he is supposed to introduce Ray to Mama as a potential future bride she is called away by a family emergency.  They meet again in New York five years later.  Ray does not wait for a wedding ring from the now married Walter and he begins to “keep” her in an apartment.

Walter refuses to let Ray work or have a child so she spends a lot of lonely time waiting around while he is with his family or on extended business trips.  Eventually, his children discover the affair but are unable to break it off.  Twenty-five yers of mutual devotion end as they inevitably must, even in the pre-Code days.

John Boles overdoes it but Dunne is solid as a rock in this.  I believed every one of her tears without feeling manipulated in the least.  Recommended.

Back Street was remade in 1941 with Margaret Sullavan and Charles Boyer and in 1961 with Susan Hayward and John Gavin, neither of which I have seen.

Montage of clips