Back Street

In Cincinnati at the turn of the century, Ray Smith, a shop girl, falls in love with the banker Walter Saxel. That Walter is engaged to a woman of high social standing is the first obstacle between them. An unforeseen mishap keeps them from leaving together and Ray is left alone. Five years later they meet again; Walter is now married and has a son. Ray becomes his mistress, and what follows turns into a long wait. The film puts at its centre the price the woman pays: being shut out, being alone, and the emptiness between short meetings. The account does not glorify the affair, but it does not judge Ray either. Charles Boyer and Margaret Sullavan take the leads in Robert Stevenson’s eighty nine minute American film, a new version of a story filmed before, completed in 1941.