Forbidden (1932)

Director Frank Capra is best known for a signature style that employed heavy use of Americana and high idealism. This style had not yet been fully developed at the point that Mr. Capra (here credited as Frank R. Capra) wrote and directed this original 1932 story. Staring Capra's muse at the time Barbara Stanwyck, Forbidden tells the story of  lonely librarian Lulu Smith (Stanwyck) who meets and falls in love with older lawyer Bob Grover (Adolph Menjou) on a cruse to Cuba, afterword she moves to the city to be near him only to find out that he is both married and the local district attorney. Having by this point become pregnant by him and not wanting to complicate his life and career Lulu disappears for a few years but is eventually tracked down by Grover who in course of events, and not his intent, ends up taking custody of his own daughter who is presented to his infertile wife as a child he adopted for her.

Lulu ends up writing an advise column of all things for a city paper that has taken an editorial dislike to Grover, whose political star rises from district attorney, to congressman, to senator, and eventually gubernatorial nominee. During these roughly twenty years Grover continues to see Lulu on the side and eventually his health starts to fail, at which point he decides he wants to give up his career and reputation to spend what time he has left with the woman he really loves (Grover's actual wife is a good person, whom he seems to have married out of a combination of pity for her own chronic ill health as well as her family's money being of aid in launching his own political career). To prevent Grover from dropping out of the governors race Lulu finally agrees to marry the anti-Grover newspaper editor Holland (Ralph Bellamy, early in his career) who has been trying to marry her for decades. What happens when the anti-Grover Holland realizes that his new wife has been his political enemy's mistress for decades constitutes the climax of the film, which I won't spoil.

Needless to save Forbidden is unlike any other Frank Capra film I've ever seen, the mans been dead for nearly 25 years yet his work was still able to surprise me. I've seen most of Capra's sound pictures but I'd almost forgotten that this one even existed when I saw it show up on TCM's schedule recently, I looked it up in the directors autobiography and he devotes only three short paragraphs to the film, and generally seems to have considered it a mistake. This is probably because its kind of uneven and so tonely different from his later work, yet I'd say the films still a success and particularity interesting as its show the man capably, if not expertly, handling a different kind of film making, probably the only movie by Frank Capra that could really be considered part of the 'pre-code' genera of film. A surprising curio. ***