Her Sister's Secret (1946)

the audience applauded

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

A melodrama that fits in perfectly with its place in the historic time it was set and nowhere else. If a man was walking out with a gal in 1946 immediately after the second world war, he may well have made taking her to this movie a part of his courtship! Nancy Coleman (looking shockingly like Judy Garland) and Margaret Lindsay play sisters with problems... Renee can't have children and Antoinette inadvertently gets pregnant!These days it's easy to be confused about why the people in this movie do what they do... but up until the 1970s being a 'child out of wedlock' was not something anyone would willingly own up to and being unwed parents was something approaching a criminal offence!Anyway, this movie opens up in New Orleans and the Mardi Gras celebrations. The balcony celebrations of the 1940s are nothing like the bawdy carryings on of today! But people still had lots of fun and let their emotions get the better of them... so, Toni meets Dick and they, well, they let their emotions get the better of them... and Toni ends up preggers.Dick gets called up to fight the good fight and after some miscommunication, he simply disappears from the scene. The cad, right?Anyway, the baby is born and secretly adopted by Renee in New Orleans and Toni promises to keep the whole thing a secret and scarpers off to a new life in New York."There's nothing that we should ever regret in life except not having lived it!That's Toni's dying father's last piece of good advice to his unhappy daughter. Now she is so consumed with her own mistake that she gets on a train to New Orleans and secretly sees young Billy from a distance in the local park. After a few weeks of stalking her own son, it gets a little bit creepy and at one point Toni even thinks of picking the child up and running off with him.Dick shows up in New York and visits Renee in her apartment where all the pieces fall into place. The final fifteen minutes are great melodrama and of course everything, thankfully, ties up neatly!Well, it is what it is but despite the delicate subject matter, it comes across as good drama and is still worth a watch. There is a terrible version of this on YouTube and unfortunately, I don't know of a better one.As usual, there are plenty of interesting stories attached to the other players in this movie... Louise Curry plays the stunning, nameless girlfriend of Dick early in the movie. After tiring of the acting game in the mid-1950s, she turned her hand to decorating houses and died aged 100! Fritz Feld provides comedy relief as a wine salesman. If there's a maitre'd, waiter or chef in a movie it's probably this fellow! There are many more...I found it watchable but it is old, it is dated and the themes that it tackles certainly don't apply these days.

Toni (Nancy Coleman) is at Mardi Gras and meets a soldier named Dick (Phillip Reed) and they impetuously fall for each other and they have sex*. She gets pregnant and they lose contact. Not wanting to be an unwed mother, she convinces her sister (Margaret Lindsay) to adopt the child and pretend it is hers. Renee agrees but stipulates that Toni needs to stay away for at least three years, as she's worried Toni might change her mind and try to take the baby back to raise on her own. Some time passes...and Toni's commitment to the agreement begins to wane...Although there are a few overly dramatic and overwrought scenes, this is a good story and it really packs great emotional impact...particularly when Toni decides to go back on their agreement. You'll find yourself getting angry, sad...the whole gamut. Well worth seeing.*Sex in the 1940s was pretty much taboo in films, so here the camera pans to the sky and the music intones and then the sun rises...hardly a love scene but about as far as censors back then would let them go.

World War II era Mardi Gras in New Orleans complete with confetti, parades, and streamers, where the well-heeled daughter of a scholar on the Mayas meets and has an "indiscretion" with a soldier about to be shipped out to fight in the war. The real drama comes after the baby arrives and the meaning of the film's title becomes clearer, as the older sister of the young woman convinces her that she and her (the sister's) husband could raise the baby as their own and everyone would believe they were the baby's biological parents. The story moves from New Orleans to New York with a stop at a ranch in Arizona, the young sister (Nancy Coleman) finds the emotional attachment to her baby is stronger than she expected and forces the older sister to hold her to her promise, which is the angle that really motivates the movie.

Her Sister's Secret (1946)An enchanting double-entendre title, and a slightly forced but still effective melodrama. The time is intense—World War II—and the desperation of lonely men and women leads to the crux of the plot, a child born out of wedlock.This only happens after some decent character development, mainly between the man, a charming average fellow played by Phillip Reed, and the woman, who is the main character, Toni, played by a charming Nancy Coleman. Neither actor is well known, and you might make a case for their plainness here. Both are convincingly normal people—not the glowing stars that live in someone else's universe.Because these regular folk are facing a pretty common problem, though one that was hushed up or swept up at the time, at least amidst the upper middle classes depicted here. The large twist is the immediate solution to the problem, a believable convenience in wartime. It leads to emotional conflicts and some heartwrenching decisions, and eventually to a crisis involving really good and well-meaning people.Such is a melodrama.The filming is typical amazing 1940s Hollywood, dramatic and silky. Cameraman Franz Planar has a huge resume of quite good but not stellar films, but I've seen a number of them recently and am impressed by a steady professional richness to them all (I'm thinking of "Bad for Each Other," an odd but beautiful Charlton Heston vehicle). This visual sense helps hold the film up as it rises and falls through the streets of Mardi Gras to house interiors. It's all rather enjoyable if never quite riveting and demanding.This movie might be forgettable if not for the cult favorite director, Edgar Ulmer. And it truly is his panache that lifts a B-movie to something worth watching. It lacks the dazzle of his famous movies like "The Black Cat," but it still has a slightly daring social twist for the time. Give it a go on a quiet night when you can get absorbed.