Exclusive“Paula” (1952): Guilt, Compassion, and the Long Road to Healing

The flowers close their petals, the blackbird's song is done. The morning hours ended, the long, long night begun. The little grave beside me, a cross of coven stone. One little flower, quite a loss of coven stone. A little flower needed, and I am quite alone. Then bright with flower, a sunny morning sky. A blackbird near us singing, how fast the moments fly. A little form beside me, a hand in both my own. A whisper spoken, A little form beside me, a hand in both my own. A whisper... Well, I'm just amazed by the whole thing. Not many women would take in a child in that condition. You know, teaching someone to speak again is no bargain. Don't you know? Know what? Why, she's the one who's responsible for his condition. She hit him with her car when she'd been drinking, and then she took him in to try and cover up. That's not true, didn't you know? She told the whole story to the DA. She hadn't been drinking. The poor little tyke just ran out on the road. She couldn't help hitting him. Well, why didn't she say so from the start? She was afraid to on account of her husband. He'd just been made dean of the university, you know, and couldn't risk a scandal. Well, I still say taking him in was the very least she could do. And I still say not many women would have done the same. Tell me truly, would you have stopped if you were Paula? I'm Tiffany Brannon. I'm Rebecca Brannon. Welcome to Real Thoughts on Cinema. Unwanted pregnancies and the overwhelming amount of children in the foster care system are both very prevalent issues in today's society. One issue which is discussed a lot less is infertility and miscarriages. However, it's an issue which many families face. Any woman who has suffered a stillbirth or a miscarriage will tell you that that pain and loss never goes away. One movie which addresses this issue and shows how a certain woman copes with it by taking in another child is Paula from 1952. This film follows Paula Rogers, a young woman who has just suffered her second miscarriage. Her doctor informs her that she is incapable of having children. This was her last chance. And although she tries to hide her despair from her husband, it has deeply affected her. Not only the loss of this child, but the knowledge that she can never have her own children. In fact, she goes to another doctor to try to find out if he'll get a different result, but he confirms what the first doctor told her. Meanwhile, her husband has just been offered promotion to become dean of the university where he works. While driving down a deserted highway one night, a little boy runs out in the road and Paula hits him with her car. Although she gets out to try to help him, a farmer, who she passed a few moments before, assumes that she's been drinking and takes the little boy away, refusing to tell her to what hospital he's taking him. The next day, she finds out that it's been filed as a drunk hit-and-run case, and due to her husband's important new job, she's afraid to come forward to the police. However, she wants to help the little boy, so she takes a job as a volunteer at the hospital where he's being taken care of. She finds out that he has lost the ability to speak due to the accident, and at her doctor's suggestion, takes him into her home to help him with speech therapy. However, as time goes on, the police are trying to find the person responsible for the accident, and things take a dark turn in her relationship with the little boy when he realizes that she's the one who hit him. This movie was produced by Columbia Pictures. The director was Rudolf Mattei, and the producer was Buddy Adler. It stars Loretta Young, Kent Smith, Alexander Knox, and Tommy Rettig. Of course, at the heart of this film is Loretta Young as Paula. Yes, the title character. Such a beautiful performance from her, and I think really such a great example of the kind of characters for which she was so famous. Yes, she was always such an emotional actress, saying it all with her eyes, which were huge, like her most defining feature, I'd say. So expressive. And you see that perhaps better than ever in Paula. Yes, she made her acting debut in a silent film when she was only three years old, so she'd had a long time to hone her craft. And actually, her two sisters were also actresses, but she was the one who really made it big. And this was toward the end of her movie career, wasn't it? She was her third from the last film. Yes, she only made two more films after this, and she had been acting since silent films, not only as a child actress, but as a young woman. And, of course, her most famous performance, best remembered, is in The Farmer's Daughter, 1947, in which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress. And although she didn't get any award acknowledgement for this performance, it definitely seems like the kind of performance which would get an acknowledgement from the Academy. Wouldn't you say it's mainly the fact that this wasn't a very high-profile movie, that it wasn't thus acknowledged? Definitely, I would say so. But it definitely has that Oscar-bait feeling in the way it's such a feature of her character and her acting. And, of course, the end of her movie career wasn't the end of her acting career, as after that she became very important in television. That's right. She had a show which started out being called Letter to Loretta because the idea was that fans would write letters asking her different questions, and she would answer those questions on the show. But after the first season, they scrapped that idea, so then it became just the Loretta Young Show. And she won three Primetime Emmy Awards for that, and a Golden Globe. And she was very strict about that she didn't want reruns done of it because she wore a different evening gown at the opening of her time, and she didn't want them to show her an evening gown that was out of fashion, because fashion's changed so quickly back then. And later on, the station actually did re-air it, and she sued them because they said they wouldn't do that. It was in the contract, and I believe she won. She was just always a very principled woman, but not necessarily in the traditional sense we think of, like a strong woman, because she was very gentle and emotional, as you see. Yes, that's true. So beautifully shown by her performance in this film. She's strong, but also so delicate and vulnerable in a way, and that's, I think, what gives this character so much depth. Sort of redefining the definition of a strong woman, you could say. Bringing it back to perhaps the more traditional sense, like we see in medieval saints, as opposed to modern politicians or something like that. Showing that the strength of a woman can be in her determination to fight for her husband or defend her child or do what she knows to be right, even when it's not a popular thing to do. And I love seeing movies from this time period, of the 30s through the 50s, in seeing how womanhood in the 20th century is depicted. Yes. As we see, characterized by so many great examples. And, you know, actresses like Katharine Hepburn are more what we think of as strong women, and she definitely was, in her private life, a very strong, liberated woman. But then we have Loretta Young, on the other hand, who was strong in her principles, and she played characters like in The Farmer's Daughter, a woman who ends up getting involved in politics, even though she's a very old-fashioned Congresswoman. Because, ultimately, she's not trying to be emancipated or anything like that. She's just defending her principles and things that she thinks are important. And in this film, she's a woman who is just so destined to be a mother. She so much has the heart of a mother, and then the tragedy is, of course, that she can't bear her own children, but that the relationship she forges with little David Larson, taking him into her home, it does start out as she feels responsible, obviously, for his condition. She wants to help him, but then she so quickly grows to love him because she has so much love in her heart that she just needs someone to lavish it on. And I think she really stands out in this movie because she's the biggest star in it. That's right. Now, Alexander Knox was a very popular British actor, and he plays the doctor. But the actor who played her husband, Kent Smith, wasn't that big of a movie star. No, he did more stage work. Yeah, he's in other movies, of course. He actually was one of the founders of the Harvard University Players, which brought out some really great talent later on. But I think this is an interesting role of the leading man, because it's kind of a toss-up who's more of the leading man, her husband or the doctor, because the doctor's more prominently featured. And speaking of how this is such a female-centered film, it's an interesting case of her husband is basically just that. He's her husband. Right. Because it's really her story. We don't see much about the university or his job. It's almost more of a plot device that he's becoming the dean. But we see how he has a similar desire to her to have children, but he loves her more than the idea of having a child, so he tries to be very supportive of her as she's dealing with the fact that she will never be able to have their own children. And you see him. This is, I think, a very important and very relevant message now. We talk so much about disability and having sympathy and not being prejudiced against people who suffer from any kind of disability, and that's what this little boy is going through. At first, Mr. Rogers, her husband, is not crazy about the idea. He's like, I want to have a normal child. And he struggles with that because as the dean of the university, I tell my students to have tolerance, but deep down, I just want a son I can be proud of, like any other man. It's hard to practice that. Yes. But how quickly he grows to love him, and then he is proud of him seeing how he improves every day learning to speak again. Because he loves his wife more than anything else, and so he sees how having this child means so much to her, and so he wants to support her in that and to help her find meaning for her life again. And of course, little David, little boy, is a very big and very challenging part, especially for a young actor. Very few lines, because his character takes most of the movie to learn how to speak again, and he doesn't speak before the accident. And what I think is so brilliant of his being a counterpart to Loretta Young is you talk about she's so expressive with her eyes. Yes. And he is too, and he has to be, being a nonverbal character for the most part. And so the two of them together, it's quite powerful. They just both say so much with their expressions. Yes, they do. You can see there's a real special bond there, and that young actor, Tommy Rettig, is best known for being in the first Lassie television series. Oh, interesting. Starting in 1954, and then later on in his life, after he got out of acting, he actually became a computer programmer, quite well known. I think that the theme of education is really important in this movie, because the reason that she takes in this boy is that he needs the kind of one-on-one therapy and teaching that really can only be done by a mother. When we think about it, the miracle of speech is mentioned. How many muscular combinations it takes just to form basic words, and yet most people aren't really taught to speak. You just learn it as a baby because you hear your parents speak. The mother, or if a father is the main reason, raising a child, but that parent teaches a child how to speak in a way that is almost impossible in a school setting. That's why it's so hard to learn a foreign language compared to how easy it is if you grow up speaking a language. She takes on that role of teaching a seven-year-old boy how to speak. The doctor shows her how to do it, but ultimately it's that love and patience she uses, showing him how to form each letter as he's like a newborn baby, not knowing how to speak. It's because of that, one of those films that really makes you stop and think about these amazing miracles that we have that we take for granted. Yes. Just the concept of that, having to learn to speak that painstakingly, it's kind of dumbfounding to think about. The condition is called motor aphasia, and it's actually quite common after either traumatic brain injury or stroke. Yes, that's right. This is a very severe case in film that he totally has complete loss of speech because a lot of times it's more, you have a hard time thinking of the right words. Or slurred speech. Slurred speech, struggle to form the words. But this, because of damage to a certain part of the brain, and the amazing thing is that he still comprehends perfectly. He can understand other people. He can communicate. And he doesn't suffer from any other kind of paralysis. Right. His body doesn't seem to be injured, but the part of his brain that controls both speech and writing is severely damaged. And I think here the important thing isn't whether they actually used speech therapy like that at the time, or whether his injury is completely accurate. It seems very accurate, but the important thing is the messages of the patients, the teaching, the learning, the generosity, and the love, which develops between not only this woman, but her husband, and how patient and loving they are toward him, and how that love gives this little boy, who really never knew it before, since he was an orphan. Yes. But they show him a real family, and the sort of love and patience which is needed by every child, whether he's experienced an injury like this or not. One thing I really appreciate is at the beginning of the movie, how real and almost raw it is. The first time we see Paula, she's lying in a hospital bed, and this is right after she's had a miscarriage, and she's not wearing much makeup, her hair is really messy, and it's so real. You see a bit of Loretta Young as a real person, like she really is being this woman having gone through the most traumatic incident of her life. I appreciated her dedication as an actress, especially in the most glamorous era of Hollywood, that she was willing to let it be that real, and I think that's kind of an argument against some people thinking everything always had to look perfect in classic films. For an emotional impact, I think because it usually was so polished, it hits you harder when you see a moment like that, that they let the guard down. She's still very beautiful, she's just more... It's really capturing the grief in that moment, as she's crying, and then, before her husband comes, she wants to put on her makeup, and the nurse helps her do her hair, showing another part of what womanhood meant at that time. How many ladies' journals would recommend to always get up before your husband, put on your makeup. You always have to look perfect. That's what being a woman meant, and we see in Paula both the vulnerability of a woman in her weakest moments, and then the personal dignity she had in maintaining her polished, feminine performance when presenting herself to the world. My outfit is inspired by the dress which Paula wears on the night of the accident. It's a dark-colored dress with the full skirt, very signature of the 1950s, large sleeves, a large necklace that her husband gifted her, a fashionable hat, and light-colored gloves. My outfit is inspired by one of the simpler outfits which Paula wears when she goes to pick up David from school one day. It's a patterned skirt with a little cardigan, a scarf around the neck, and lower-heeled shoes. The first time I saw this movie, I was really impacted by the fact that it reminded me of some of the real-life incidents which Loretta Young experienced in her own life. That's right. Most notably, the very controversial situation involving her daughter Judy, who was the illegitimate child of Clark Gable. Now, there's a lot of history there, you really have to read about it, but the way she felt a mixture of guilt, even though she really was quite innocent in the situation, and acting as the adoptive mother to her own child, but that mixture of shame when she wasn't really guilty and a feeling of responsibility, as well as just a difficult relationship with motherhood, I think is part of the reason why you see such a real performance from her. I think she brought all those difficult experiences in her life to life on the screen, and it makes this performance so real, so believable, and so convincing. People like to talk honestly way too much now about being method acting, and obviously that is a very definite school, people use that way too loosely, but I think something that isn't often acknowledged is even if you don't actually subscribe to the method acting school, a really great actor usually, you use something of yourself and your own life experiences to inform a performance, because how else are you going to make it be real? And I think some people more than others, or some actors are like, that person is just so talented at acting, you just conjure up that emotion out of nowhere. But to see a more vulnerable performer where they kind of want to inform it more and make it more personal, there's something very special about that. I think that's probably more likely to bring you to tears as an audience member. And the kind of arbitrary thing about the method, especially as it's loosely used, is that you have to literally experience everything that character is experiencing, you can't do that, especially with the fast pace of movie making back then. But you can give a great performance, but when you come upon something to which you deeply relate, it automatically is more real. As we said, this movie isn't that well-remembered or that largely acknowledged, but because of that, it's widely available in some very clear copies for free. For instance, there are some great copies of it for free on YouTube, so anyone can watch it, no cost. It also is available, of course, on DVD, which you can buy it from Amazon, Walmart, Barnes & Noble, but if you want to watch it quickly, I definitely recommend looking it up on YouTube, and you can find it on some other free streaming platforms as well. Paula is all about this wonderful relationship between a mother and an adopted son. So many classic films are devoted to the family unit, sometimes a very healthy one, and sometimes more difficult ones. Join us next time as we talk about a light-hearted film about three precocious sisters who are determined to reunite their family unit by getting their divorced parents back together. Thank you for watching. Goodbye.