Always Goodbye

This movie is clearly one you must suspend all sense of disbelief in order to enjoy it. This isn't saying it's a bad film....I actually liked it. But it has a plot that certainly is far-fetched!

When the film begins, Margot (Barbara Stanwyck) is waiting for her fiancé to arrive at the marriage license bureau. However, as she's waiting he's killed in a traffic accident right in front of her!!! To make things worse, she's pregnant*! So you next see her about to kill herself when she is caught by Jim (Herbert Marshall) and he takes her under his wing and gets her back on her feet. He also helps her find a nice adoptive couple when her baby arrives months later. But although Jim is marvelous, he has a real wandering spirit and is sometimes gone for years on his sea travels.

In the meantime, while Jim is off on one of his voyages, Margot gets a job with a fashion studio and her life is really going well. In fact, soon a crazy Count, Gino (Caesar Romero), is chasing her and proposing marriage. He's a nice guy...just a bit full of himself.

Soon after, she sees an adorable kid in a hotel and realizes this boy is her biological son she gave up years ago! So, when she learns he's going on a cruise, she arranges to go on the same ship and soon the two become inseparable. But there is a huge problem-- the boy's mother has died and the woman his father (Ian Hunter) wants to marry is just awful and cares nothing for the boy....Margot's baby! So what's she to do and who is she to marry when THREE guys all pop the question?!

Thi is an enjoyable film mostly because although far-fetched, the acting is quite good and the story engaging. Well worth seeing, though it is one of Stanwyck's lesser-known films.

Barbara Stanwyck is waiting in front of the marriage bureau for the man who is going to marry her. His car shows up and smashes into another. He's dead. Miss Stanwyck goes to the river to drown herself, only to be saved by Herbert Marshall. Seven months later she gives up her baby. Soon she is working in a dress shop for Binnie Barnes. Five years later, she is on a buying trip to Paris when she meets her son.

It's based on an Ann Harding weeper, GALLANT LADY, but I expect that version is pure soap. With Raymond Griffith producing and Sidney Lanfield directing, while the dramatic elements of Miss Stanwyck torn between Mr. Marshall and her son -- with Cesar Romero, at his most manic, playing an Italian count who adores her when he isn't chasing other women -- while those elements remain, there are plenty of gags and silliness. It's an interesting attempt at combining two seemingly immiscible elements, mostly by having Miss Stanwyck go quiet and contemplative. It works for me, except for the penultimate scene. It's hard to say how it will strike other viewers. Some people are offended by comic relief, and to make a light-hearted picture about a a mother's tears might seem heartless. Me, I'm one of those people who recognizes the absurdity of a cruel situation, and the ridiculous methods needed to fix them. Sometimes if you don't laugh, you're paralyzed by tears.

A remake of the 1933 film Gallant Lady, directed by Gregory La Cava, starring Ann Harding and Clive Brook. Somebody must have thought that the work needed an upgrade, with bigger stars, such as Barbara Stanwick and Herbert Marshall. Directed by Sidney Lanfield, this new version has everything to be a success: a good cast, a trip to Paris, the glamour of American and Parisian fashion. But it continues to be a melodrama about maternal love and how a mother sacrifices everything to be with her child.

It is curious to see Barbara Stanwick, an actress who has forever been associated with femme fatale and male manipulator roles, playing a loving mother, fighting for her son's love.

Too melodramatic for my taste, it can nevertheless be enjoyed by many, for precisely the same reasons.

Really enjoy Barbara Stanwyck and will watch any movie she's in. She can shore up even the most humdrum potboiler with her acting talent and make any picture better. Her mettle was tested in "Always Goodbye", a picture with nothing new to add to the romance genre, and she did the best she could. Alas, she was done in by a flat script and uninspired dialogue and despite an excellent support cast, featuring Herbert Marshall, Ian Hunter, Caesar Romero and Lynn Bari, among others. I'm not sure anything short of a rewrite could save this rehash of many other similarly themed pictures.

This picture was shown in error at Film Forum in NYC; The 1931 film with the same name was supposed to be shown but somehow this was substituted. Right now I would rather have seen the older one. Sight unseen, I'll bet it was better than this plodding trudge through the landscape.

This is the book Barbara Stanwyck reads to the little boy in the movie. I actually had a copy of it. I only remember Sambo was black and there were a lot of pancakes.

The book was banned some time during my childhood for being racist. I just checked Amazon it's still out there - tons of different publications apparently somehow cleaned up.

I bring this up as a point of interest.

That out of the way, Always Goodbye stars Stanwyck, Herbert Marshall, Ian Hunter, and Lynn Bari.

Stanwyck plays a woman whose fiancé dies in an accident just as they are about to be married. She is pregnant at the time, and gives her child up.

Well, I don't have to tell you what happens.

Stanwick is lovely. Cesar Romero is annoying as a man who chases every woman he meets, and Lynn Bari is very uppity as the fiancé of the boy's adoptive father whose wife is deceased.

Stanwyck has played much stronger roles. I felt like this was a waste of her talent.

The child, Johnnie Russell, is still alive. He went into a he foreign service and at one point served as Ambassador to Oman.