It's easy to picture Barbara Stanwyck as a torch-singing gangster's girl; not so a farmer's wife. And she feels exactly the same way in The Purchase Price, a pre-Code weirdie in which she plays Joan Gordon, nightclub singer and girlfriend to bootlegger, Eddie Fields (Lyle Talbot.)

After it's established that Joan has been singing up and down Broadway since she was a teenager, we see her give Eddie a very collegial brush-off, explaining that she's going to marry into society and leave all this thuggery behind. A few moments later, the chap in question calls off the wedding, because he has learned that she has been running around with Eddie, and that just won't do. So Joan grudgingly goes back to the gangster (who's already married), soon gets fed up and beats it to Montreal after seeing a picture of it in a newspaper. Unfortunately, Eddie's lackeys find her singing under an assumed name, and she has to find a way to skip town again. As it happens (and there being no handy newspaper clippings), Joan's maid is leaving to marry a Nebraska farmer whom she met through a marriage broker, but confesses that she sent Joan's picture instead of her own to sweeten the pot. Thus, with the same deliberation she gave to moving to Canada, Joan decides to trade places with the maid and marry this guy in Nebraska.

This is all in the first 10 minutes. It goes on in fits and starts from there.

The farmer turns out to be George Brent (miscast), awkward agricultural-school graduate Jim Glison, a man who expects to sleep with a woman on the first day he met and married her, then holds a grudge when she rebuffs him. Meanwhile, Joan makes a spectacular adjustment to the awful, awful circumstances, conditions, and people in her new community. She cooks, she cleans, she makes the wood stove work (see The Egg and I), and for some reason, falls in love with Sulky Jim.

There are ups. There are downs. There is an unpleasant local muckity muck who keeps trying to take over Jim's farm (and fondle Joan). Eddie turns up as well, but only to prove to the audience that Joan would have had way more fun with him. Oh, and an oddly-affecting scene in which Joan helps a neighbor woman newly-delivered of a baby and her terrified older daughter (the great Anne Shirley), who no doubt witnessed her mother giving birth. THAT's the movie I wish this had been.

The Purchase Price reminded me at times of The Canadian, the 1926 film about a city girl forced by circumstances to marry a farmer with no mod-cons (and precursor to the excellent Victor Seastrom/Lillian Gish picture, The Wind). Same 'wedding night' standoff. Same cross-cultural adjustment horrors. Same eventual reconciliation and marital harmony, if a more believable one. At other times, the film reminded me that 68 minutes can seem like four days.

All in all, an uneven, interesting picture that underscores Barbara Stanwyck's ability to make long-johns and work gloves unbelievably attractive. Also that unless the non-gangster is Gary Cooper, she should stick with the affable bootlegger.

George Brent was born in Ireland to an Irish mother and a British father, who was either in the British Army, a shopkeeper, or a newspaperman (mysterious inconsistency among the biographies). Brent was orphaned at the age of 11 and moved to New York to live briefly with an aunt. After returning to Dublin as a young man, he became an active member of the IRA where, during the Irish War of Independence, he got into some trouble and had to escape to Canada to avoid being arrested.

Brent got the acting bug while a student at the National University of Ireland and joined a Canadian theatre company while in exile. Eventually, he made his way to New York where he appeared in stock plays and early silent films, also picking up the first of five wives, actress Helen Campbell (1925-27). In 1930, Brent went to Hollywood to appear in minor supporting roles to the likes of Rin-Tin-Tin and Charlie Chan, and to fail a few screen tests. Thanks to actress Ruth Chatterton, who would become his second wife (1932-34), Brent landed a leading role in her film, The Rich Are Always With Us (1932). 

And the rest is leading man history. 

1932 would see George Brent play opposite some of the strongest leading ladies of the time: Barbara Stanwyck, Loretta Young, and Joan Blondell, Throughout the 1930s and into the early 1940s, he was one of Hollywood's most durable leading men, playing opposite such heavy hitters as Kay Francis, Ginger Rogers, Greta Garbo, Jean Arthur, Myrna Loy, Merle Oberon, and Ann Sheridan (wife number four, 1942-43*). His most frequent co-star (11 pictures) was, of course, Bette Davis, with whom he also had a years'-long love affair.

By the late 1940s, an aging Brent found fewer romantic leads and spent a few years appearing in B pictures before retiring from film in 1953. He made a number appearances on television until retiring for good to his California horse ranch in 1960...with wife number five, model Janet Michaels (1947-1974) whom he survived. Brent died at the age of 80 of emphysema on May 26, 1979.

I like George Brent best when he's a rake or a playboy. His noble, long-suffering do-gooder parts tend to leave me cold, with the notable exception of his portrayal of Dr. Steele in Dark Victory, but only because he puts up with Humphrey Bogart's horrible Irish accent so effortlessly.

But I can watch him in Jezebel any day; he really is a perfect scoundrel.