Wait Till The Sun Shines, Nellie (1952)

Told in flashback, a young barber (David Wayne) and his bride (Jean Peters) settle in a small town in Illinois. She is disappointed as she thought they would live in Chicago as small town life is not for her. Based on the novel I HEARD THEM SING by Ferdinand Reyher and directed by Henry King (SONG OF BERNADETTE). What seems to be intended as a nostalgic look at small town America (1890s to the 1920s) and the heartaches endured by a small town barber was looked at as something else by me. It showed the status of women in this period when their lives were controlled by their chauvinist husbands. Husbands kept things from wives as if they were to be "protected" from such things as mortgages, property ownership, where to live, major decisions that should have been talked about and decided equally were the realm of the husband. When Jean Peters as the wife runs off to Chicago with a married man (Hugh Marlowe) and is killed off early in the movie, I thought, "Good. At least she doesn't have to rot in a hick town the rest of her life tied to the dull David Wayne!". With Albert Dekker, Helene Stanley, Warren Stevens, Joyce MacKenzie and William Walker.