Primrose Path (1940)

A teenage girl (Ginger Rogers) is the daughter of a mother (Marjorie Rambeau in an Oscar nominated performance) who supports her squalid family as a prostitute. The girl marries an upstanding young man (Joel McCrea) but keeps her mother's lifestyle a secret. Based on the novel FEBRUARY HILL by Victoria Lincoln (by way of a stage adaptation by Robert H. Buckner and Walter Hart) and directed by Gregory La Cava (STAGE DOOR). How this racy scenario escaped the wrath of the Hays code, I'll never know. I'm not familiar with the source material, either the book or the play, but apparently this film version is faithful to neither. Once again, the 29 year old Rogers is unconvincing as a teenager but after her character marries, she matures rapidly and Rogers is okay after that. The possibilities of the narrative are never satisfactorily executed and the ending is phony. The most interesting characters aren't the two leads but the prostitute mother (Rambeau) and her bitch of a mother (Queenie Vassar), who may have been responsible for pushing her daughter into prostitution. With Henry Travers, Miles Mander and Joan Carroll.