My Reputation

Curtis Bernhardt's 1946 American film follows Jessica Drummond, who has lost her husband. In the first months of mourning she forms a friendship with an army officer, and the people around her turn it at once into gossip. The subject is other people deciding how long a woman's mourning should last. Her mother, her friends and her two sons each apply their own pressure; the narrative places the real conflict not in the relationship but in that watching. Barbara Stanwyck leads and plays the part without pleading for it; George Brent is the officer. The narrative moves within the studio melodrama form of its time but keeps the woman's decision in her own hands to the end. Who it's for: those who like classic Hollywood melodrama and Stanwyck's films. Who it's not for: viewers expecting a modern outlook; the resolution is built to the moral measures of the period.