Underdog Warners actress Ida Lupino could hold her head high, turning out pictures like this — a Bette Davis reject that proved a winner. It’s an overachieving backstage musical soaper using some of the studio’s ‘A-minus’ talent. Lupino moves heaven and earth to carve out a starring showbiz career for her younger sister Joan Leslie, only to make everyone miserable. With a screenplay rooted in real-life anxieties that the actors knew well, Vincent Sherman’s direction makes everybody look good: Gladys George, Dennis Morgan and especially Jack Carson. When Crawford ‘went noir,’ she must have seen this movie as something to emulate.

The Hard Way
Blu-ray
Warner Archive Collection
1943 / B&W / 1:37 Academy / 109 min. / Street Date August 26, 2025 / Available at MovieZyng / 24.99
Starring: Ida Lupino, Dennis Morgan, Joan Leslie, Jack Carson, Gladys George, Faye Emerson, Paul Cavanagh, Julie Bishop, William Hopper, Lou Lubin, Lon McAllister, Dolores Moran, Nestor Paiva, Emory Parnell, Philip Van Zandt.
Cinematography: James Wong Howe
Art Director: Max Parker
Costumes: Orry-Kelly
Film Editor: Thomas Pratt
Montages: Don Siegel
Dance numbers: LeRoy Prinz
Music Composer: Heinz Roemheld
Screenplay by Daniel Fuchs, Peter Vertiel
Executive Producer: Jack L. Warner
Produced by Jerry Wald
Directed by Vincent Sherman

The all-male fraternity running the Hollywood studios kept actresses in limited roles — as support for male stars, mainly. But they also saw the value in ‘women’s pictures,’ star vehicles for big-name talent. Warners produced numerous pictures featuring Kay Francis, Loretta Young and Ruth Chatterton, before the rise of even bigger stars Olivia deHavilland, Bette Davis and then Joan Crawford. Finding good roles for such demanding talent was rough, and both Davis and deHavilland rebelled against the industry’s unfair contract system. While the top three names got special treatment and a choice of material, the next tier of talent struggled with ‘leftover roles’: Jane Wyman, Ann Sheridan, Priscilla Lane — and Ida Lupino, a talented independent thinker who took her fate into her own hands.

Ms. Lupino knew how to seize an opportunity. Her ‘support’ role in  They Drive by Night stole the spotlight from George Raft and Humphrey Bogart; her ‘girlfriend’ role in her next picture  High Sierra was almost as important as that of star Bogart. Yet she was often shoehorned into indifferent program pictures; she never quite reached the position to be able to pick and choose. It was often thought that Warners knew Lupino was a major talent, and kept her around to keep ‘uppity’ divas like Bette Davis in line.

When a worthy Ida Lupino picture came around, she was usually singled out for praise. 1946’s  The Man I Love takes place in a somewhat non-glamorous Los Angeles; Ida may have won the part because Olivia deHavilland didn’t want to play ‘seductive’ women and Bette Davis could no longer do it well.

Three years earlier came The Hard Way, a show that at first looks like an excuse to keep ‘available’ talent from the Warners contract roster from standing idle. Vincent Sherman was a dependable new talent who did well with actresses, while cameraman James Wong Howe was not yet acknowledged as a genius outside of his peer group. But the picture clicked. Daniel Fuchs and Peter Viertel’s screenplay takes an unusually frank look at the realties of showbiz ambition. It sketches a largely uncompromised view of How Stars Became Stars, and why so many burn out in the attempt. In 1943, The Hard Way must have felt like a rebuttal to 101 musical biographies that depicted entertainers as finding happiness singing and dancing in a happy world of talent and fair play. Wartime audiences liked escapism, but they also appreciated being treated as adults.

In other words, the ‘noir drift’ of dark ideas and adult conflicts was seeping into more genres than just crime and detective stories.

In the backwater steel town of Greenhill, unhappy housewife Helen Chernen (Ida Lupino) wants to do what’s right by her spirited younger sister Katherine Blaine (Joan Leslie), who aspires to performing on the stage. When Helen’s older husband Sam (Roman Bohnen) refuses to pay six dollars for a white graduation dress, Katie is humiliated. Helen swears that she will get them both out of Greenhill, and will help Katie achieve her dreams. Katie meets the traveling vaudevillians Paul Collins and Albert Runkel (Dennis Morgan and Jack Carson) and stays out late with Albert. At first furious, Helen sees an opportunity. She endorses the idea of Katie and Albert marrying, and then ditches Sam to go on the road with them.

Katie joins the Collins & Runkel act, which becomes strained by Helen’s interference. Helen and Paul are mutually attracted to one another, but Paul can see through her manipulations. Still a confused kid, Katie doesn’t understand why Helen is constantly pushing for her, upsetting Albert and Paul. Helen places ‘getting ahead’ over Katie’s marriage to the nice guy Albert.

Seeing Vaudeville as a dead end, Helen wangles a job for Katie with the theatrical company of John Shagrue (Paul Cavanaugh), and convinces her to leave Albert behind. Helen then sabotages Shagrue’s musical star Lily Emery (Gladys George) to win Katie the top role. Just as stardom looms for Katie, Albert comes back, clumsily demanding the return of his wife. It’s the beginning of a tragic string of events, as Helen pushes the increasingly reluctant Katie into a high-pressure dramatic role in a show by the prestigious playwright Laura Britton (Leona Maricle).

The Hard Way is surprisingly uncompromising. Helen is ruthless when fighting for Katie’s career, in a way that Paul Collins notes immediately. It’s implied that Helen might sleep with an agent (Nestor Paiva) to help Katie get a job; that at least seems very possible. Helen doesn’t think of herself as a shark, but Paul makes it his business to mock her protests of innocence. He becomes her conscience for the remainder of the film. As musical bio conventions lead us to expect the two of them to make up and live happily ever after, The Hard Way’s ‘adult’ story resolution seems all the more sophisticated.

Helen doesn’t have it easy. She manages to get the major players Shagrue and Britton on her side just as her sister begins to crack up. Unhappy about her separation from Albert, Katie becomes erratic. Shagrue drops out, which motivates Helen to produce Laura’s new play on her own. But Helen doesn’t realize that Katie has had enough, that she simply wants to quit. And she wants to quit with the one person that interests Helen.

The Hard Way really becomes serious when a major character commits suicide, near the beginning of the third act. We’ve already witnessed Helen’s backstage treachery, destroying Gladys George’s pathetic star, but the suicide really hits home. We’re told that executive producer Jack Warner ordered the addition of a flashback framing device. Helen begins the movie with her own suicide attempt, after which she recalls the terrible events that led her to take her own life. The Production Code disapproved of any depiction of suicide, and Hard Way has two of them. We have to think that the Code Office okayed the second self-willed death because it aligned with their own peculiar morality: the censors were keen to see that ‘sinful women’ were punished.

Ida Lupino stood out because she was capable of a very wide range of roles; Warners’ top divas couldn’t say they could do better. Her Helen is convinced that following rules and playing nice gets one nowhere, yet the performance shows levels of concern and conscience beneath Helen’s hard surface. Helen must rattle off a number of powerful speeches, and Lupino nails all of them. As noticed by Pauline Kael, she gets so worked up that a bit of her English accent slips in once or twice.

Was this the height of Joan Leslie’s Warners career?  Her Katie Blaine comes off as shallow but sincere; seeing her humiliated at her graduation puts us solidly on her side. Katie is not that pure — she’s partly complicit in some of her sister’s machinations. The screenplay allows a nice character arc as Katie’s feelings deepen for Albert, going against her unspoken career pact with Helen, loyalty that seems like a wrong choice. Still barely 19 years old, Ms. Leslie would soon be dropped by Warners when her contract expired — she had been one of the studio’s brightest and most talented youngsters. Her subsequent career had some good achievements but didn’t flourish as it had when she was a teenager.

We’re not particular fans of either Dennis Morgan or Jack Carson, both talented performers. Morgan’s character Paul is no saint either — Helen is quick to point out his Don Juan attitude with the ladies. When Paul gives up Vaudeville and becomes a bandleader, the movie’s semi-musical format gives Morgan an opportunity to sing.

This show may be Jack Carson’s finest hour — Albert Runkel is his most sympathetic character. Carson is excellent as a song & dance guy who’s style is fading fast. Albert’s career path is mostly bad news after Katie decides to work apart from him. (Gee, we think, why couldn’t a part in Laura’s play be found for Albert?)  The hardest blow comes when a cheap club owner suggests that Albert cash in on his wife’s success … a depressing development indeed.

The Hard Way incorporates a lot of music, but introduces just a few new songs. Most come right from the Warner library, tunes familiar from  Busby Berkeley musicals. The production stretches to include an impressive big-stage musical number, and one very good stage play scene, where Katie has a nervous breakdown. Director Vincent Sherman doesn’t block scenes as tightly as might Michael Curtiz, preferring to give his actors a bit more leeway, like Raoul Walsh. The pace is enforced by the swift scene transitions. Many are skilled, creative musical montage bits, credited to soon-to-be-director Don Siegel.

The Hard Way is quite an entertainment, giving us good actors in roles that stretch their abilities. It’s unpredictable, yet true to the psychology of its characters. Most importantly, we never get the idea that the filmmakers are playing down to us. We’re always treated like adults.

The Warner Archive Collection Blu-ray of The Hard Way is yet another HD encoding that blows away older TV prints. The added bonus here is James Wong Howe’s cinematography, that finds interesting lighting schemes that flatter the female stars. The opening scenes in the industrial town are often noted as good work by Howe. Poor teenaged Katie looks miserable posing with her fellow students in their white dresses, and the stark lighting underscores her humiliation.

The beefy soundtrack allows Heinz Roemheld’s music score to do its thing. We also admire Warners’ orchestrators, that nimbly thread their way through so many song standards, often using them as underscoring.

The WAC gives us remastered short subjects from the target year of 1943. The Aristo-Cat is the first of seven cartoons starring the cheese-loving mice Hubie and Bertie, directed by Chuck Jones. Scrap Happy Daffy is a bizarre home front cartoon in which Daffy Duck, owner of a scrap metal yard, must deal with Hitler’s metal-eating goat from a U-boat. To fight back, Daffy becomes a super-hero, ‘Super American!’

The live action short subject Gun to Gun, actually from 1944, is an odd little mini-western. We don’t care, as its leading lady is none other than sentimental favorite Lupita Tovar. Over the Wall, directed by Jean Negulesco, is a maudlin prison story with Tom Tully as a priest and Dane Clark as an uncooperative prisoner. It feels like an audition reel, but for who?

Fans of The Hard Way might go for its radio adaptation, with an interesting new cast: Franchot Tone, Miriam Hopkins, Anne Baxter & Chester Morris.

Joan Crawford was at Warners in 1943 but lying low, trying to calculate the perfect comeback vehicle. Producer Jerry Wald helped Crawford navigate four or five of her WB pictures, and we think that his Hard Way served almost as a template.  Mildred Pierce has a flashback bookend with a similar suicide attempt, adding a murder. The wraparound flashback structure in  Possessed places Joan in a hospital bed as well. That’s a lot of women that just can’t handle terrible relationships.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

The Hard Way
Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
Lux Radio Theater broadcast(3/20/1944)
Cartoons The Aristo-Cat and Scrap Happy Daffy
Short subjects Gun to Gun and Over the Wall
Original Trailer.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: October 5, 2025
(7386way)

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