Barbara Stanwyck’s roles in the romantic holiday comedies Christmas in Connecticut and Remember the Night are more than enough to cement her as Old Hollywood’s Christmas queen, but if you dig a little deeper, several of her other films boast seasonal settings that make them perfect annual watches. One of Stanwyck’s most underrated, in terms of both holiday movies and just movies in general, is the 1946 wintry melodrama My Reputation.
Directed by Curtis Bernhardt, Stanwyck stars in the film as Jessica Drummond, an upper-class woman who resides in a conservative Chicago suburb with her two sons, 14-year-old Keith (Bobby Cooper) and 12-year-old Kim (Scotty Beckett). Jessica became a widow several months ago when her beloved husband passed away after a long illness, and she’s spent the lonely time since then fending off the advances of male friends and dealing with the opposing views of her mother (Lucile Watson), who has continued to wear black every day since her own husband passed away 25 years ago, and who would like to see Jessica settle down with someone respectable and dependable. With her sons away at school, Jessica decides to get away from it all and join her friend Ginna (Eve Arden, one of the great best friends in Hollywood history) and her husband Cary (John Ridgely) to Lake Tahoe.
It’s while skiing at Lake Tahoe that Jessica meets an Army Major, Scott Landis (George Brent), and the pair quickly fall for each other, although Scott is commitment-shy and Jessica spurns his casual advances. They reunite in Chicago, where it turns out that Scott is stationed for the time while he waits for orders to be deployed overseas, but when Jessica’s disapproving mother and snooty friends get wind of their relationship, the rancid gossip about them spreads like wildfire, and her children are caught in the middle of it.
Almost the entirety of My Reputation is set in snowy locales (James Wong Howe’s gorgeous black-and-white cinematography highlights its chilly beauty), but the final third is specifically set over the holidays, and the typically joyful season— scenes of Jessica and her family trimming the tree, for instance— serves as a nice contrasting backdrop to Jessica’s relationship woes. The conflict really comes to a head at a glamorous New Year’s Eve party, where Jessica finally confronts the gossipers (who disapprove of her supposed behavior, although Jessica has resisted consummating the relationship up to this point).
My Reputation bears a lot of similarities in both setting and story to Douglas Sirk’s later, much more well-known melodrama All That Heaven Allows, but it’s based on a novel by Clare Jaynes titled Instruct My Sorrows. Catherine Turney, one of the first women writers to be given a contract at Warner Brothers, adapted the book for the screen, and having her touch is a likely reason why My Reputation is such an incisive look at gender, class, love, marriage, and motherhood from a woman’s perspective. This is most apparent in a lovely scene in which Jessica tries to explain to her boys how lonely she had been without their father, making it plain that even though she is their mother and her love for them comes first, she possesses other desires and needs as well.
Stanwyck may spend the movie clad in stunning Edith Head costumes, but this is largely a quieter, more low-key role for her, one that further demonstrates her vast range. My Reputation was also her fifth and final pairing with leading man Brent. Their collaborations date all the way back to the pre-code era, the most notable of which is the iconic and controversial Baby Face. My Reputation was actually filmed in 1943 into 1944 and screened for soldiers that year, but Warner Brothers decided to hold it from public release until after the war ended, believing it would go over better with audiences then (it’s interesting to consider how post-war the film’s ending reads as potentially a lot less dire than it would have had World War II still been raging). My Reputation may not be as cheerful as Stanwyck’s other holiday movies, but it’s just as worth adding to your rotation.
My Reputation is available to rent or buy on all digital platforms. Runtime: 94 minutes.
Katie at the Movies 