DVD of the Week: “Primrose Path”

The joy of criticism is discovery—sometimes it’s the arrival of a wonderful new film, sometimes the revelation of new wonders in one that’s already familiar, and sometimes the excavation of something from the past that turns out to be a buried treasure. So it was earlier this year, with the astonishing screening, at Anthology Film Archives, of “Unfinished Business,” Gregory La Cava’s tearfully antic tragicomedy of romantic longing, cavalier carnality, alcoholic haze, degradation, and redemption. Of course, I knew a few of La Cava’s films (most famously, “My Man Godfrey” and “Stage Door”), but “Unfinished Business” put these actorly masterworks in a new light and made me eager to see more by him—such as “Primrose Path,” a 1940 hybrid, which I discuss in this clip. La Cava was a master at staging grim, painful subjects with a comic tone, as if to do an end-run around studio bosses and censors alike and make movies that howl in agony even as viewers howl with laughter. So it is with “Primrose Path,” the subject of which is prostitution (and, for good measure, alcoholism, poverty, violence, casual sex, and male predators) and which features actors (including Ginger Rogers, Joel McCrea, Henry Travers, and Queenie Vassar) who lend it a rollickingly spirited extroversion. The famous last line of Max Ophüls’s “Le Plaisir” is “Le bonheur n’est pas gai”—happiness isn’t cheerful. Well, La Cava consistently proves the converse: cheerfulness doesn’t have to be happy.

P.S. To our DVRs—this Friday morning, August 24th, at 6 A.M. E.T., TCM will broadcast La Cava’s 1932 drama “Symphony of Six Million”; I’ve never seen it; I’ll report back. Also, Amazon offers, streaming, his 1929 drama “Big News,” co-starring Carole Lombard (so early in her career that she’s still credited as “Carol”); I’ve just gotten started, and, five minutes in, am utterly ensnared.