Matcollis This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.

ManiakJiggy This is How Movies Should Be Made

Majorthebys Charming and brutal

Stephanie There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

Khun Kru Mark 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.

blanche-2 We know from people like Bobby Darin and Jack Nicholson that, with the stigma of having an illegitimate child once so prevalent, the person you call "Mommy" might not be. Your real mother could in reality be your sister, your aunt, anybody.In "Her Sister's Secret" from 1946, director Edgar Ulmer keeps this film out of maudlin territory and presents a poignant story of a mother's pain at having to give up her baby for her sister to raise.Nancy Coleman stars as Toni, a young woman who meets a soldier, Dick (Philip Reed) during the New Orleans Mardi Gras. They fall in love, and he wants to marry her. They decide to wait until his next leave to be sure. When they part, they agree to meet, if they both feel the same, at a restaurant. Unbeknownst to her, his leave is canceled. He writes to her at the restaurant but the letter never reaches her. By then, she is pregnant. Toni finally confides in her sister Renee (Margaret Lindsay). She and her husband (Regis Toomey) have not been able to have a child, so she offers to raise the baby as their own. Toni agrees, but in her heart, she never really gives up the baby. After her father dies, she starts literally stalking the child and his nurse, sitting in the park each day. Truly alone now, she makes a decision that is going to cause problems.One can't help watching a film today and realizing how different things were when the film was made. Can you imagine someone sitting in a park each day, watching children, and a nurse handing you a kid and asking you to watch him for a minute? Like I suppose that happens. She would have been picked up by the police the minute someone notices she's there every day. We live in a much different society now.Also, having an illegitimate child was tantamount to being a criminal, so bad you had to disappear, return later with someone else having taken your baby, or say you were married and your husband died, or end up in a home for unwed mothers. Nowadays people take out headlines announcing an unmarried pregnancy. Amazing.Anyway, Toni is in terrible pain, and one can't help but feel for not only her, but all the women who went through that situation years ago. In Toni's case, because she believed Dick didn't love her, she could not get past losing the baby, Billy, too.The Mardi Gras scenes are marvelous, showing the festivities and people's enjoyment. The acting is very good, with Nancy Coleman giving a lovely performance as a heartbroken woman, and Margaret Lindsay as her sophisticated older sister. Philip Reed, who at some angles bears an eerie resemblance to Tyrone Power, is fine as the soldier who leaves without realizing he's going to be a father. Regis Toomey plays Lindsay's husband, and he comes off as a genuinely nice guy and a good man.How wonderful that the little boy who played Billy, Winston Severn, has posted here with his reminiscences of the film. Though he was only four at the time, his memories are strong. I really liked this film. The actors pulled me in, and it was well directed. Not the world's greatest production company, but it pulled off a winner.

dougdoepke Plot-- A pregnant young woman is left with responsibilities when her soldier lover is abruptly sent overseas during WWII. So she looks to her married sister for help. All of which leads to unforeseen complications.PRC was infamous for its bottom-of-the- barrel dreck, so why take a chance on one of its productions. All in all, this movie's a good reason why. No, the 1946 flick's not going to be confused with a glossy Ross Hunter soaper from the prosperous 50's. Still, this 90-minutes is well-mounted, well-acted, and intelligently handled. That opening Mardi Gras scene is a grabber, conveying a real sense of joyous abandon. Clearly, PRC popped bigger bucks to back director Ulmer, while Ulmer responds with style and restraint. I particularly like the way the couple's intimate night is conveyed. First there's Toni and Dick in a romantic upspiral, then Ulmer cuts to a romantic shot of the night sky, and finally he inserts a gloriously lit daybreak. The result is a tricky topic finessed via cinematic art. Then too, a topic like unwed mothers and lost love could easily descend into overload. But not here. The movie manages its touching parts without getting sappy. Plus, the principals (Coleman, Lindsey, and Reed) calibrate without over-emoting despite the heavy material. I expect the topic of tangled relationships really registered with uprooted wartime audiences. Looks too, like the story's moral says a lot about there being more to parents than just biology, even if the point takes a while to work out. I guess my only gripe is with the heavenly choir ending, which really does pile it on. Anyway, this skillful production shows that even lowly PRC could manage a respectable result when it really tried.

jeffreynothing I saw this film at a screening several years ago at the Edinburgh Film Festival. The picture was actually introduced by Mr.Ulmer's daughter. It's a typical 1940's melodrama that is well directed. It is apparent in viewing the film that Ulmer knew exactly what he was doing when he made a movie. It was only the second Ulmer film I had seen, the first being the superior Detour. I can't remember the plot in too much detail because it was a while ago, but it involves an illegitimate child. It has a good social message in that it sheds light on how so-called "bastard" children are sometimes the subjects of social discrimination. I'm surprised it hasn't received more votes. I guess I was lucky to catch that screening.