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.

• Weirdest, sweetest scene: Lillian Roth singing "If I Could Be With You" to a picture of Joe E. Brown, of all people.
  
  
• Great line: Pointing out a mannish, cigar-smoking woman in the ladies room, "Watch out for her; she likes to wrestle."

The Entertainer: Movies, Magic and My Father's Twentieth Century, 
By Margaret Talbot
Riverhead, 2012

Turns out I have seen a surprising number of films that star or feature Lyle Talbot. Perhaps this isn't such a huge surprise, as I am crazy for pre-Code pictures, and having been one of the original horses in the Warner Bros. stable, the man made about 8-12 films a year for that outfit. Talbot could play sniveling, smoldering, or sophisticated, or all of the above all at once, with a dash of dastardly.

Talbot began a career in theater as a magician's assistant, carny, and performer in traveling tent shows throughout the Midwest while still a teenager. He learned to act on the road and eventually wound up in Hollywood, where handsome young men with theater experience could work in talking pictures. Talbot signed with Warner Bros., with other regulars, Joan Blondell, Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, Ann Dvorak, and Warren William, and churned out (as noted) a lot of movies every year.

Perhaps because of this, Talbot was one of the founding members of the Screen Actors Guild, a labor union formed to protect actors from the hard hours, grueling production schedules, and multi-year contracts with invasive terms fostered by the major studios. Warner Bros. in particular (and ironically, given the "every man" theme of so many of their stories) was one of the most notoriously exploitative places to work.

Although he never quite reached star status, Lyle Talbot worked steadily in motion pictures throughout the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, then made a successful transition to television, appearing in everything from The Life of Riley  to Who's the Boss?, with a long, recurring role on about 70 of the 50,000 episodes of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. The man worked and worked.

He also married a lot and drank a lot, and yes, he was in a bunch of Ed Wood, Jr. movies. 

Last year, the AFI Silver Theater in Silver Spring, Maryland ran a mini-festival of Talbot's early films to celebrate the publication of Margaret Talbot’s book, The Entertainer, which is part memoir, part biography of her father's life and career. Having just bought the book and devoured it, I went to listen to Margaret Talbot talk and to see one of my favorite pictures, Three on a Match, which I'd never seen on the big screen.  As I wrote at the time, her book is a real page-turner. It covers the entire landscape of American popular entertainment of the 20th century — her father’s century — with a journalist’s detail and a child’s affection. 

His is a fascinating story...and now it's available in paperback. Buy it for his birthday.