Verführt (1949)

Verführt: Directed by Elmer Clifton, Ida Lupino. With Sally Forrest, Keefe Brasselle, Leo Penn, Dorothy Adams. After a beautiful but unsophisticated girl is seduced by a worldly piano player and gives up her out-of-wedlock baby, her guilt compels her to kidnap another child.

“To dismiss Not Wanted (alternate title: Shame) as a dated glimpse into the socio-sexual mores of the bad old days is to forget how revolutionary it was. Ida Lupino – one of the first women to make the break from glamorous stardom into the male preserve of directing – co-wrote and co-produced this movie about what we would now call single motherhood but was then whispered about as illegitimacy. (Tellingly, though Lupino took a reportedly large hand in directing as well, she spurns the credit, leaving it to Elmer Clifton.) u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eSally Forrest plays a scatterbrained young woman who canu0026#39;t even remember to bring home duct tape for the leak her dadu0026#39;s trying to fix or potatoes for momu0026#39;s stew. She slings hash by day but at night dreams moonily of a lusher life, as represented by the hot piano-man at a night club (Leo Penn). She throws herself at him, and he catches (his flicked-away cigarette drifting slowly down a stream encodes their rapture). But, footloose and fancy-free, Penn packs up to try his luck in that provincial Paris, Capitol City. In a huff, Forrest packs up, too, and follows him there, only to be brutally blown off.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eShe takes a job as a gas jockey at a station managed by lame veteran Keefe Brasselle, but resists his tepid approaches at first (scant wonder: he plies her with his model trains.) But joining him at an amusement park, she swoons; a doctor called in diagnoses her as pregnant, much to her surprise. Without a word to her family back home or to Brasselle, she packs up yet again and checks herself into The Haven Hospital, a home for either (take your pick) unwed mothers or wayward girls. Much as sheu0026#39;d like to keep the baby, itu0026#39;s an unworkable option, so she grudgingly gives it up for adoption. But soon sheu0026#39;s wandering the streets eyeing other womenu0026#39;s babies a little too loonily. Next, the police are involved….u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eA more or less `happyu0026#39; ending – undoubtedly the only condition under which the picture got made at all – canu0026#39;t compromise Not Wantedu0026#39;s unblinking look at what pregnancy without a wedding ring spelled for women who proved less than vigilant about their chastity. Itu0026#39;s a compassionate (if melodramatic and sentimental) assault on a complacent mind-set that, disrupted by the exigencies of wartime, was striving to reassert itself (and strives still). Whatever else may be said about single parenthood, itu0026#39;s no longer a cause for scandal and indignation. Lupino can take at least a little of the credit for that.”