Forever Amber

Orphaned during the civil war and raised by a farming family, Amber St Clair has one aim: to get into high society. When a group of cavaliers passes through the town she slips away with them to London. In seventeenth-century London the way up runs through the right men; Amber learns that and uses it. The higher she goes the more she owes, and the more she owes the higher she has to play. Otto Preminger's film was adapted from Kathleen Winsor's 1944 bestseller. The book had been banned for obscenity in a number of states, and the censorship office initially said it would allow no adaptation at all. When the film came out it was condemned by the Catholic decency board; over Preminger's objection the studio added a narrator's voice to the beginning and the end. The condemnation was then downgraded.