January 6 movie: Play Girl. Like Life Begins, this was a Loretta Young melodrama about a down-on-her-luck young woman. I guess she must have made a lot of these during the Depression. There was another one after this, in which Young's husband George Brent is out of work, and resents Young for having a job. That description reminded me too much of the hateful Front Page Woman, so I didn't watch it.
Anyway, Play Girl. Loretta Young is a department store girl who gets married, finds out her husband is an inveterate gambler, kicks him out, becomes so destitute she has to turn to gambling herself, and then somehow reunites with her husband. Who may not be gambling anymore, but since he abandoned his pregnant wife to abject poverty I can't very well call him reformed.
Increased freedom of content didn't make the pre-code movies better films per se, in fact a lot of them are silly, sleazy trash. But I love the gleeful sexiness of them anyway. This one has a great line: one of Loretta Young's old friends from the department store comes to visit her, admires the dainties in her lingerie drawer, and then reminisces about "the old days, when we one had one pair of panties apiece." Imagine a 1950 movie getting away with dialogue like that!
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