TrueJoshNight Truly Dreadful Film

Solemplex To me, this movie is perfection.

Noutions Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

Zandra The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

evening1 On the surface this is a tearjerker about an extramarital affair.But Lana Turner also turns in a thoughtful performance touching on more difficult themes including fears about getting old, selflessness, and self-respect.The affair between Lily and dapper, married Steve (Ray Milland) is convincing, although they never are shown so much as kissing in this black-and-white weepie from 1950. However, nothing much has changed in the dynamics of trying to be happy at someone else's expense.It's interesting to see the beautiful Ms. Turner not winning the man in the end. Here she winds up lonely but stronger and wiser. I don't mind a message now and then and this one's a goodie.

moonspinner55 Kansas girl makes a splash in New York City as a print model, but her love affair with a married man may ruin her. From the era where independent career girls were only ambitious until a man entered the picture, this "woman's movie" is naive and rather unconvincing, though it is seldom soft; the knowing dialogue has a sharp, bitter edge, and the performances are solid, making it a cut above the usual soap opera. Isobel Lennart's screenplay is dotted with cutting little truths--too many, perhaps; often, the greedy masochism is underlined with a moral conscience (and tinkling piano keys) which turns the whole thing into a heavy-breathing melodrama for sufferers on the high road. Lana Turner does a lot of striding up and down, and she seems too seasoned to be a novice in the film's opening scenes, but her desperate gaiety is touching. Ray Milland does his usual colorless nice-guy turn, but Ann Dvorak is startling playing an over-the-hill model and Margaret Phillips (as Milland's wife--an invalid who beams with sanity and understanding like a saint) is excellent in the film's big scene, where the two women meet. Not an important picture, nor a provocative one, but a star-vehicle that does manage to touch upon some resonant truths about women, their careers, and their fragile hearts. **1/2 from ****

bkoganbing A Life Of Her Own casts Lana Turner as a small town girl who with her beauty goes to New York for a career as a model. She's got the looks, but has she the character for the profession? She reports some six months after the agency that Tom Ewell runs called for her. It was a simple matter of economics, Lana just didn't have the train fare from Kansas. But very much like Lana Turner in real life, discovered in Schwab's Drugstore in Hollywood because of her beauty and made a film star, Turner becomes a success in the modeling profession.Anything's better than life in Kansas and Turner's after more than a career. She meets Ray Milland who is a mine owner from Montana back east to raise some money with the help of lawyer Louis Calhern. Of course the inevitable happens as it usually does in these films, but the problem is Milland is slightly married to Margaret Phillips.Here's where the film gets real sudsy. Phillips is a paraplegic as a result of an automobile accident. The subject is rather delicately handled with the Code still in place, but the clear inference is that Milland is not enjoying any kind of sex life any more. So he's more than willing to get involved with Turner.The Code parameters both limit how the subject is handled and the inevitable outcome of the film which I won't reveal. George Cukor directed A Life Of Her Own and the film is definitely missing his usual flair for 'women's' pictures. And the film is clearly Lana's with the rest of the cast in support.Some younger players at MGM like Jean Hagen and Phyllis Kirk play other models, but Ann Dvorak in one of her last films has a couple of scenes as an older woman trying to make a comeback in a profession that lives and dies on youth. She only has a couple of scenes, but they've got some real bite to them. I wish we had a lot more of her in the film.A Life Of Her Own is not one of the better films for Cukor, Turner, or Milland, but it's entertaining enough given the Code parameters it was made under.

vandino1 Lana Turner was off screen for two years and came back with this dull film. And what happened to her? The ravishing beauty of 'The Postman Always Rings Twice' from only a few years before is gone. At only 29 years of age when filming this, she looks 39. Not only that, but she appears tired and uncomfortable throughout, as does co-star Ray Milland. She's supposed to be a spirited young wannabe from Kansas but she looks and acts like a cynical fashion plate sharpie from New York who is slumming. Milland is supposed to be a Montana copper miner unfamiliar with the Big City, but you don't believe it for a second. This is one odd little soap opera, with the ultimate point being that our little Kansas-innocent-in-the-big-city has attained that Coming of Age discovery, realizing she'll have to go on without her Great Love and forge that "Life Of Her Own." Sure, but Lana's worn face and manner makes her coming-of-age appear more like a mid-life crisis. Sadly, the film stacks the deck against her by putting her up against crashing bores like Milland and Barry Sullivan. And once Margaret Phillips shows up as Milland's crippled wife, and is so lovable in both her scenes, you know the Turner-Milland relationship is hopeless.The true sin of this film is that it becomes increasingly boring. It starts fine, with Ann Dvorak taking hold as a fading model turned sour drunk. She exits early, unfortunately, but she gives the film a charge. Tom Ewell, as the manager of the modeling agency who gives Lana her start, is excellent in a fast-paced, fast-talking scene. But when Milland shows up the film slows down, then crawls. A romance between the two is manufactured out of slopped-together bits, from a piano player in a nightclub playing the same theme over and over, a kid getting Lana and Milland involved in buying a jalopy, and (no kidding) a ventriloquist goofing around with them. So, it goes, yawn by yawn, but during all this forced dramatic hoo-hah is a parade of eye-blink bits by many familiar film/TV faces. There's Kathleen Freeman as a switchboard operator, Richard Anderson as a note-taker, wheezy-voiced Percy Helton as a diner owner, Hermes Pan as (of course) a dancer, Frankie Darro (all grown up) as a bellboy, Frank Gerstle (the Jeff Chandler-like actor who played the doctor who tells Edmond O'Brien he's a dead man in 'D.O.A.') as a party guest, along with Beverly Garland as a fellow party guest, and Ann Robinson (of 'War Of The Worlds' fame) as a model. There's also Madge Blake (Aunt Harriet from the 'Batman' TV show) and Whit Bissell. It never seems to stop. Fortunately, the film does stop... or more likely runs into a dead end and gives up.