This is the last scene and completely out of keeping with the rest of the movie. It is really a dark little tale of a one-night stand that results in an unwanted pregnancy. This was a tear-jerker of the first magnitude. Neither star has ever looked better. Happy ending, sure, but a lot of angst before getting there. The scary scene at an abortionist pre Roe v. Wade kept a lot of girls on the right path for years.
Both gone now and way too young.
Todd Mason has other links to forgotten movies.
15 comments:
Patti - Oh, I haven't thought of this movie in a looooong time. Thanks for the reminder!
It's been a long time since I've seen this one. McQueen was a favorite of mine from THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN and WANTED - DEAD OR ALIVE.
I miss black & white movies.
Jeff M.
Haven't seen this one.
A pretty good movie. I thought, daring, in its time. If they didn't have a happy ending, then the Natalie Wood character would have had to have died in the film. You know how it was then.
I'd forgotten about this one, Patti. Don't think they show this one much on TV.
Another movie with a similar theme but with much younger actors was BLUE DENIM. It was based on a play with a totally different ending. Brandon de Wilde was the boy in the film, Carol Lynley the girl.
I remember that one too. You're right death or marriage was the only choice.
In movies, you mean? I gather in real life, if you had enough money, you went (or were sent) to Catholic Puerto Rico or Catholic Mexico or even largely Catholic Switzerland where good abortion clinics were, or you were lucky enough to be in touch with a proto-"Jane" network or otherwise had access to a reasonably brave and/or enterprising doctor who wasn't a butcher...if you didn't have the money, girl, you got to take your chances...I'm not sure I've ever seen LOVE here, but an early viewing of THE L-SHAPED ROOM might have helped shape my staunch pro-choice politics over the years.
So maybe that's another double feature, LOVE/L-SHAPED ROOM.
L-Shaped Room is another favorite and the book (Lynne Banks?) was great too.
I try to explain to my girls (all teenagers) what a colossal "shame" it was for a woman to have a baby out of wedlock just two generations ago and they look at me as if I've sprouted a second head; that type of world just doesn't seem possible to them.
What amazed me when I became an adult was finding out (often by hearing my elders casually discuss it) how common abortion was in my grandmother's generation. Apparently quite a few of my great aunts underwent more than one, and they were performed by their own doctors. The same was true in Jackie's family.
Who knew?
There was an HBO documentary some years ago by a guy (I'm pretty sure it was a guy but it could have been a womqn) whose mother died after an illegal abortion. The picture of her dead in a dingy motel room has remained with me ever since.
Of course, growing up we were at the generation where birth control pills were just coming into general use and there were many pregnancy scares - and a couple of more or less shotgun marriages - among our generation.
Yes, Todd, Puerto Rico was definitely a place women of means and a certain age went before abortion was legal here.
Jeff M.
Thanks for the clip. I remember seeing this film when it was new. It certainly took up a subject that you were likelier to find in a euro movie like L-Shaped Room at the time. Though there was also Splendor in the Grass, also with Natalie Wood. How beautiful she was. McQueen seldom failed to disappoint either.
I think I meant "seldom failed to please." Watch for more of these slips since I've turned 70. They may be what I'm eventually remembered for. . .
For sheer beauty, this wins prizes. Although Beatty was no slouch in that dept. in SITG either.
In another interesting moment of sychronicity, I was listening to NPR's Fresh Air while driving home this evening and the topic was the history of birth control. The woman being interviewed wrote an article about birth control in this week's New Yorker. As Jeff points out, the abortion statistic was astonishing: About 1 in every 3 pregnancies was terminated through an illegal abortion in the 1920s. My great-grandmother limited her family size using a crochet needle. Yikes!
Anyone looking at their family tree will notice female members who died fairly young--not all of them died of influenza, I assure you.
And those days may return!
Happily, the trend was turned back at bit yesterday in Mississippi, albeit it was a referendum on a law so insane that Haley Barbour couldn't get behind it.
Likewise Kasich getting his union-busting arse handed to him.
Very sad that the closest thing to victories the left is getting are these assertions of good sense by the center against the far right, but any actual assertion of good sense by centrists is welcome.
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