The Purchase Price (1932)

Barbara Stanwyck, George Brent
directed by William Wellman

she wants it, but he knows better.
it took forty years for movies to become this honest again.

A surprisingly good B-movie from solid early talkie stars Stanwyck and Brent.  Stanwyck is the nightclub singer who gets in a jam, so runs away to Sasketchewan as a mail-order bride to farmboy George Brent.  But the real drama lies in the post-marriage, surprising prescient battle-of-the-sexes between Stanwyck and Brent.  Not a great melodrama by any standards, but worth watching because it's old, and the subject matter is unusual.

Director William Wellman produced some pretty entertaining flicks back in the day, entertaining if only they were so inappropriate.  I had a good laugh with my friends the first time through Night Nurse (1931), which is also a very stupid movie, but funny for the same reasons.

It's interesting that, although Purchase Price was filmed during the depths of the Great Depression, there are no references at all to, "the state our country's in", indeed, it seems the only time you hear these statements in classic movies is, like, in Mr Deeds Goes to Town, probably in the context of a simple, everyman Joe decrying his countrymen's moral decay.  Healots!  A nice respite from those assholes on CNN and Fox who won't shut the fuck up about how bad our economy supposedly is.  Dedoimedo is probably right; it's probably a hoax by the one percent to get the rest of us to accept lower wages.  Fuck you, society.

This was such a nice movie.  Wellman could have chosen to have gone overboard, but he only does so when it's funny, and keeps it sweet and subtle when it counts.