Forbidden

Frank Capra's 1932 film is among the bitterest melodramas of the period before the Hays Code. Lulu Smith, a librarian in a small town, spends her savings on a trip to Cuba and falls in love with Bob Grover aboard ship; when he tells her he is married she ends it. She then becomes pregnant, gives birth alone, and learns that Bob is a rising politician. She passes herself off as the child's nanny. Barbara Stanwyck plays a woman spending her life on someone else's career without inviting pity. Capra later counted this among the weakest films of his career, but Stanwyck's performance and the moral latitude of the pre-Code era hold it up. The ending, showing how self-sacrifice becomes a trap, is harsh. Who it's for: viewers interested in pre-Code Hollywood and early Barbara Stanwyck. Who it's not for: anyone troubled by melodrama centred on a woman's self-sacrifice, or bothered by the story's long jumps in time.