Red Screamer wrote: Thu Jun 20, 2024 4:15 pm
This is Stahl at his best, one of the great class-crossed lovers melodramas. Grace notes and grounded detail are intertwined perfectly, gliding from the overflowing urban flavor of the first act to the spiritual intimacy of the climax. I didn’t remember that Cain was part of the mix (I’m not sure his personality is very apparent), but Stahl clearly has stronger source material here than in
Magnificent Obsession or
Imitation of Life, and runs with it.
It was fascinating reading the Cain source for this - often referred to as "a short story", it was actually a four-part magazine serial later published as a novella. Basically, what Stahl took from Cain is the union activism (something that Cain had been interested in since his days as a labour correspondent in the late 1910s) and the basic idea of a working-class woman going out with a man several notches higher up the social scale, to the visible chagrin of her union-organiser colleague. But the man isn't married, and his deep dark secret is that he's totally under the thumb of his truly monstrous mother, very much the villain of the piece (to say that she does not approve of her son marrying a mere waitress would be putting it mildly) and with no equivalent in the Stahl film.
And while part one of the serial is very close indeed to the film, it diverges significantly from the start of part two, and by part four it's become completely unrecognisable - in the film, the union subplot is neatly tied up in a matter of seconds (it being no longer relevant to the central romance), whereas in Cain's original it has an entire second act, whereby
the victory over Karb Restaurants is just the first of many, and while Carrie - Cain's protagonist - works on various union campaigns to bring down bigger organisations than Karb, she's simultaneously placing large bets on the stock market thanks to her insider knowledge that the companies' fortunes may be about to change dramatically thanks to major strikes.
As for the scene allegedly lifted from
Serenade, the judge correctly ruled that while both the novel and film feature a scene in which the couple shelters from a storm in a church, that in itself is such a commonplace scenario (since churches are traditionally places of literal as well as spiritual shelter) as to be non-copyrightable.
What was crucial was the tone, in which respect the two works couldn't have been more different, with
When Tomorrow Comes being quiet and chaste, while in
Serenade the couple basically has rampant animalistic sex right in front of the altar, something that's impossible to imagine Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne's characters even so much as
thinking about, let alone actually doing. By the end of the hearing, Cain himself was convinced that he was on a hiding to nothing, although it's an important landmark case in US legal history in that it set a precedent for future copyright disputes.
