The Other Love (Enterprise Studios, United Artists, Anglo-American Film Distributors, 1947)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, May 10) I ran my husband Charles and I an unusual movie called The Other Love, billed as based on a story by Erich Maria Remarque even though the actual basis, “Beyond,” was just a short story and not a full-length novel. It was produced by David Lewis (James Whale’s long-term life partner until they broke up a year later over a crisis in Lewis’s career: he had just produced another film based on a Remarque story, Arch of Triumph, which had been a financial mega-bomb – at least partly because its director, Lewis Milestone, had envisioned it as a four-hour movie to capitalize on the recent reissue of Gone with the Wind, only by the time Milestone finished it the bottom had dropped out of the market for four-hour movies and the studio, Enterprise, demanded he cut it to two hours, which as Milestone laconically observed “is easier to do on paper than on celluloid”) for the short-lived Enterprise Studios. The actual script was written by Ladislas Fodor and Harry Brown, and the director was André de Toth, who’s probably best known for the 1953 film House of Wax (the decidedly inferior remake of fellow Hungarian Michael Curtiz’s 1933 Mystery of the Wax Museum with Vincent Price in Lionel Atwill’s old role), which was the first major-studio production in 3-D even though De Toth, who had only one eye, couldn’t see the 3-D version of the film himself.

The imdb.com synopsis made this sound like a reworking of the 1939 Bette Davis vehicle Dark Victory: “Seriously ill, concert pianist Karen Duncan (Barbara Stanwyck) is admitted to a Swiss sanatorium. Despite being attracted to Dr. Tony Stanton (David Niven), she ignores his warnings of possibly fatal consequences unless she rests completely. Rather, she opts for a livelier time in Monte Carlo with dashing Paul Clermont (Richard Conte).” Surprisingly, I’d never heard of this film before until I was nosing around on Amazon.com and ran across a listing for it, and decided to order it mainly because Barbara Stanwyck is my all-time favorite actress, mainly because of her extraordinary versatility. She could play almost anything – romantic dramas, gangster films, screwball comedies, films noir, backstage dramas, Westerns (she was the screen's best Annie Oakley), even musicals (she never made a full-fledged musical but she did sing in quite a few of her films, and the sound of the voice between them is so similar it’s almost certainly hers) – and here she’s stuck in a rather strange tear-jerker which she enlivens by her total sincerity. The movie takes place in Switzerland (at the Mont Vierge – “Virgin Mountain” – sanitarium) and Monaco, and the opening scene showing Stanwyck playing a piano concerto (unknown to me) is utterly convincing. She certainly looks like she’s actually playing, even crossing her arms at the keyboard when the music requires it, so it’s even more disappointing when later in the movie De Toth resorts to those horrible angles in which he interposes the bulk of the piano between her and the lens so it doesn’t matter whether she can look like she’s playing or not.

The imdb.com synopsis rather gave away the ending that Karen is terminally ill – the writers clearly intended us to realize that only gradually, as Karen herself does – and it’s an odd movie mainly because De Toth and cinematographer Victor Milner shoot this tear-jerker script almost as straight-out film noir. Karen befriends fellow sanitarium patient Celestine Miller (Joan Lorring) until Celestine literally disappears – her bags are packed and Karen is told she’s just left the sanitarium after being discharged, but it slowly dawns on both Karen and us that Celestine is dead. Even before that Karen is jolted into an awareness of her impending mortality when she receives a white orchid in her room, courtesy of a standing order placed there by the husband of a former patient who had the same room, only the husband died a few months earlier and the wife died just two days before Karen was admitted. There are a number of scenes that had become traditional in romantic tear-jerkers, especially when the fatally ill protagonist was a musician, including a scene in which, alone in Dr. Stanton’s room, Karen notices one of her old records, takes it out and plays it – only to be overcome with grief at her own impending doom and to show that by literally breaking the record as it’s playing. Over and over the film amazes in the contrast between the tear-jerker plot and the almost Gothic visuals De Toth and Milner concocted to tell it.

When Karen runs off with the dashing race-car driver Paul, who came to Switzerland for a race and invited her to come back to Monaco with him (and along the way she encounters one of his previous girlfriends, natch), it’s raining almost continually during her stay. Paul literally commandeers a yacht to take her to Egypt – one of the locales where Dr. Stanton said the hot, dry air might extend her life – only she escapes at the last minute. She appeals for help to a Monte Carlo casino croupier (Gilbert Roland), but he tries to rape her instead. Eventually she makes it back to Mont Vierge and accepts Dr. Stanton’s marriage proposal even though both of them are well aware it will be only a brief marriage. De Toth, Fodor and Brown don’t even give Stanwyck the extended deathbed sequence common in melodramas about medically doomed women; instead the film ends with Dr. Stanton and Karen alone in his cottage on the hospital grounds, the camera pulls back to symbolize her demise, and the end credit comes up. The Other Love is one of those movies in which you think the backstory would have made a more interesting film than the part of the tale we actually get; I found myself wondering how Karen became a star pianist in the first place, what she went through as she established her career, whether she had any men in her life before the part of it we see, and just how she discovered she was ill.

The casting of Richard Conte doesn’t help this film; unlike Humphrey Bogart, who like Conte started his film career typecast in gangster roles, Conte is simply not convincing as a romantic hero. There’s just too much of the thug about him to make him believable as anything else. And though Barbara Stanwyck is great in it, there are plenty of other movies on her résumé that gave her a far better chance to showcase her acting chops than this one. (One of her very best films is also one of her least known: Ever in My Heart, a Warner Bros. programmer from 1934 in which Stanwyck played a woman from a well-to-do family who married a German just before World War I and suffered for it; when I saw that I found myself wishing for a modern-day remake, with the Stanwyck character marrying an Arab just before 9/11.) And David Niven, whose contract with Samuel Goldwyn obliged Enterprise to credit Goldwyn with supplying him, is just so David Niven-y; he makes us believe in his character to an extent, but it’s hard to see why Stanwyck’s character attracts him when none of the other women who’ve been in and out of his sanitarium (especially the others who entered vertically and exited horizontally) did. The Other Love is a quirky production from a short-lived studio that was obviously trying for Quality with a capital “Q,” and it’s one of those fascinating and frustrating films that is strangely moving as it stands but could have been even better.