My Forbidden Past *** (1951, Robert Mitchum, Ava Gardner, Melvyn Douglas) – Classic Movie Review 11,256

The 1951 black and white romantic crime drama My Forbidden Past stars Ava Gardner as lady with a secret Barbara Beaurevelle, who plots heartless revenge on Dr Mark Lucas (Robert Mitchum).

Director Robert Stevenson’s 1951 black and white romantic crime drama My Forbidden Past stars Ava Gardner as lady with a secret Barbara Beaurevelle, who plots heartless, cold-blooded revenge on Dr Mark Lucas (Robert Mitchum), a research doctor at Tulane University, who spurns her and marries another, Corinne (Janis Carter), a woman he married on the rebound after wrongly believing that Barbara had stood him up on the eve of their elopement.

Barbara bribes her cousin Paul Beaurevelle (Melvyn Douglas) to break up the marriage. When Mitchum’s wife is killed, he is accused of murder in director Robert Stevenson’s rather lurid and daft but watchable 1951 costume melodrama set in New Orleans at the end of the 19th century.

The rousing performances – especially that of the fiery Gardner – florid atmosphere and pacy direction see it through.

Surprisingly, given the attractive cast and story, the movie was an expensive flop for the RKO studio, recording a loss of $700,000.

There were other problems for RKO. The film was to star Ann Sheridan but RKO terminated the contract, claiming she refused all the co-stars offered her, and Sheridan sued the studio for $350,000, winning $55,162 in court for lost earnings.

The screenplay by Marion Parsonnet and Leopold Atlas (adaptation) is based on Polan Banks’s 1947 novel Carriage Entrance.

It runs only 70 minutes and the GB version is even shorter at 67 minutes.

Also in the cast are Melvyn Douglas, Janis Carter, Lucile Watson, Gordon Oliver, Basil Ruysdael, Clarence Muse, Walter Kingsford, Jack Briggs, Will Wright, Barry Brooks, Cliff Clark, Daniel De Laurentis, George Douglas, Watson Downs, Everett Glass, Johnny Lee, Kenneth MacDonald, Louis Payne, Jeffrey Sayre, and John B Williams.

It is the final film of Lucile Watson.

© Derek Winnert 2021 Classic Movie Review 11,256

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