FOR the first half-hour, a movie called “The Hard Way” is the best moving picture I’ve seen in a long time. It takes place in Greenhill, Pennsylvania, which wasn’t named for its coal-town grime and slums, and concerns a bitter woman (Ida Lupino), her coal-mining husband (Roman Bohnen) whom she left once and who in all sincerity wishes she would again, and a younger sister (Joan Leslie), who would like more than anything else a white graduation dress but instead falls in love with the clumsy half of a vaudeville team. These people are terribly plain and blundering; they are caught at unflattering moments—the high-school boy trying to get in some necking at the theatre with his stage-struck girl, who won’t relax until the acrobats replace her favorites, or the husband, who is the essence of tired living, trying to be the stern father and being laughed at. Underneath this part of the picture is a bubbling, unpredictable vitality, which moves you through grimy Greenhill into its homes and lives, which are made up of minor crises, inconsequence and cursing, the people neither all villain nor all angel but somewhere in between. These early sequences have been conceived in a true cinematic manner.
After the two sisters and the vaudeville team, which one sister married into (the other saw to it that she did), leave the nondescript railroad station at Greenhill, their life stories settle grimly into the backstage movie plot in which the girl rises from sad rags to sadder riches, while her not so talented husband mopes through one-night stands, finally to shoot himself in despair. The characters now divide off into either full villain or full angel, and become people caught in a plot which will never slow down and which is always riding roughshod over them to get to the next turning point. The two people who have shown no signs of a suicidal tendency commit suicide; a perfectly ordinary singer and dancer rises from the bottom of the ladder to the status of Katharine Cornell; a woman who you’ve been shown can only love her sister suddenly turns up in love with Dennis Morgan, a hoofer suddenly transformed into a famous orchestra leader.
“The Hard Way” lacks the emotional drive it seeks to show, of a relationship in which one woman controls and lives through the life of another. Unlike this movie, the nature of such an affair is neither so obvious nor so cold as a barber-shop pole. Watching the actions of the aggressive sister, to quote one of the actors, “is like watching the maneuvers of the Atlantic Fleet.” That is to say, her character is presented with none of the sexual prompting or the overlayer of social acceptability that should be there; she rules her sister not with an iron hand in a velvet glove but with an obvious sledgehammer.
There is still, inside some of these later situations, a little of the fine directing and writing that went into the first quarter of the movie, as well as the photography of James Wong Howe, who can give substance even to trite situations. There are genre sketches, such as that of the soused actress being knocked into shape for a play reading, which are powerful in construction, and throughout there is the director’s knowledge—Vincent Sherman—of the ways of the stage. Dennis Morgan, in a plum-pudding part as a minor-league philosopher, has lines which are neither obvious nor meaningless, and a spirited ability to make them tell. I would like to point to a raucous, vulgar nurse, played wonderfully by an actress whose name is not given. Much might have happened had Joan Leslie had the dancing-singing ability her part called for, or a face which didn’t change so drastically from view to view. Ida Lupino, a fine player, has the same difficulty breathing life into that straitjacket role of villain as Bette Davis had for years.
March 29, 1943