Attractive, soon-to-be-married Susan is lucky to survive an automobile accident, though one of her legs is lost. Will her coldblooded, creepy fiancée decide against spending his life with an amputee and call off their wedding? Will it be the pain and consternation of a broken heart which truly cripples her? Will the surgeon who loves Susan choose her over the bitch he's engaged to? Will Susan wear a variety of garments which fully expose her reduced limb?
PRELUDE TO HAPPINESS plays like a bargain basement Sirk-inspired soap-opera spiked with rose-watered acrotomophilia (amputee fetishism). This seldom-explored erotic singularity is approached with staid intent...a somber seriousness aiming to palliate and/or dignify the film's drooling sexploitation underpinnings. These indelicacies, so cleverly hidden in plain sight, could easily fly under the radar of a nescient audience. Theirs will be a markedly different viewing experience, with many sizing-up PRELUDE as little more than a bottom-tier throwback to the syrupy "women's pictures" of Golden Age Hollywood.
Rose Petra(a real-life amputee) is an appealing ingénue who manages to bring an unexpected incisiveness to her character. The rest of the cast are underwhelming, however, some downright dreadful. Despite a glaringly obvious neophyte intendance at every juncture of production(the boom mic deserves top billing), the movie is actually fairly engaging in ways which are legitimate as well as fortuitous. At the end of the day, PRELUDE TO HAPPINESS is an anomalous little "bolt from the blue" which could modestly appease a wider audience than peg-leg devotees and the extreme-cinema coterie.
5.5/10.
