Been on a Barbara Stanwyck kick and decided to keep it going with Clarence Brown’s 1950 film To Please a Lady with Stanwyck and Clark Gable. This feels like if The Fast and the Furious was made in 1950. It’s action-packed revolving around car racing, and it’s also shockingly erotic for a 50’s film.
To Please a Lady follows Mike Brannan (Clark Gable), a former war hero turned racer receives backlash because of his dangerous behavior on the track that gets a man killed. Enter journalist Regina Forbes (Barbara Stanwyck), who falls for his him and views the tragedy as an accidental death, rather than manslaughter.
It’s an interesting story, but like my synopsis, it doesn’t really go anywhere. It shows off cool scenes of car building and tuning, along with well done racing scenes for the time. But the eroticism really shocked me. There’s literally a scene where Stanwyck’s character is on the phone telling Gable’s character what she’d do to him if he were in the room at that moment. Nothing overly sexual, but for Hays code 1950, talking about lighting a fire, holding hands and kissing seems a little risqué for the time.
But overall this film was pretty mediocre. While its action is pretty cool, I could never get invested in the story, specifically with Mike and Regina’s love affair.
Been on a Barbara Stanwyck kick and decided to keep it going with Clarence Brown’s 1950 film To Please a Lady with Stanwyck and Clark Gable. This feels like if The Fast and the Furious was made in 1950. It’s action-packed revolving around car racing, and it’s also shockingly erotic for a 50’s film.
To Please a Lady follows Mike Brannan (Clark Gable), a former war hero turned racer receives backlash because of his dangerous behavior on the track that gets a man killed. Enter journalist Regina Forbes (Barbara Stanwyck), who falls for his him and views the tragedy as an accidental death, rather than manslaughter.
It’s an interesting story, but like my synopsis, it doesn’t really go anywhere. It shows off cool scenes of car building and tuning, along with well done racing scenes for the time. But the eroticism really shocked me. There’s literally a scene where Stanwyck’s character is on the phone telling Gable’s character what she’d do to him if he were in the room at that moment. Nothing overly sexual, but for Hays code 1950, talking about lighting a fire, holding hands and kissing seems a little risqué for the time.
But overall this film was pretty mediocre. While its action is pretty cool, I could never get invested in the story, specifically with Mike and Regina’s love affair.
