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A Life of Her Own (1950) is a George Cukor woman's picture young model from Kansas trying to make it big in New York, doomed romance and suicide driven depression discussing psychological critique lousy husband melodrama starring Lana Turner and Ray Milland, Louis Calhern and Ann Dvorak, Jean Hagen and Phyllis Kirk.
A rare and fascinating look into the modelling business in New York, not just like an episode of the popular streamed television min-series drama splashtacular boxed set American hit drama series Madmen (commenced 2007) and as such makes a great companion piece and double feature possibility with another Milland madvertising hit drama classic New Yorkian alcohol-driven drama story, Something To Live For (1952), which is a loveliness of lady and man acting and action, as the New Yorkians of the film noir era puddle awkwardly against the modern age and conduct their alcoholic stress accordingly, proving death and depression are only ever a step away from the American Dream and its high bourgeois gender-role-based drive to utopian perfection and happiness.
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| Lana Turner in A Life of Her Own (1950) |
Probably the greatest form of happiness possible, for a human at least, and great films in an era of great films, not well known, but entreatingly of their age and entertainingly of great perfection.
A Life of Her Own (1950), despite its commercial failure and critical ambivalence, remains a valuable artefact of the American postwar cinema, a polished, if damaged, melodrama under the hand of George Cukor. Its surface polish cannot entirely obscure the thematic dissonance roiling beneath, nor does its studio gloss quite succeed in concealing the Production Code compromises that cripple its narrative arc.
Nonetheless, it is an evocative, if imperfect, meditation on female ambition, romantic entrapment, and the American obsession with reinvention. That it also traffics in the visual grammar of film noir, despite its Technicolor lustre, makes it a particularly curious example of genre hybridization.
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| New York streets in A Life of Her Own (1950) |
At the heart of the picture is Lana Turner’s Lily Brannel James, a young woman who escapes Kansas not out of wanderlust but out of economic desperation, summoned to New York by a modeling agency that failed to anticipate her provincial delay in scraping together train fare. In the city, she is swept into the stratified world of high fashion, where age and beauty are currencies with precipitous half-lives.
The brittle glamour of the modelling industry is rendered not with Sirkian irony, but with a brittle fatalism. In this respect, the film aligns itself with the traditions of noir, which dissects the American dream in a tone of genteel despair.
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Turner, then thirty, is a curious casting choice for a fledgling model meant to radiate the unblemished freshness of youth. Yet this miscasting proves productive. Her too-polished visage and self-conscious elegance suggest a woman who has already lived too much to convincingly play innocence, and that very over-ripeness lends her character a tragic shading.
The costuming by Helen Rose is erratic, at times accentuating Turner's regal carriage, at other times revealing the studio's indecision about the precise pitch of sophistication. Sidney Guilaroff's coiffures, meanwhile, alternate between architectural precision and bizarre experimentation, as if reflecting the heroine’s own vacillations between glamorized fantasy and creeping disillusionment.
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| Barry Sullivan, Ann Dvorak, Louis Calhern and Lana Turner in A Life of Her Own (1950) |
The narrative spine of A Life of Her Own (1950) owes its origin to Rebecca West’s short novel "The Abiding Vision" from her 1935 collection The Harsh Voice, but the adaptation is heavily distorted by the strictures of the Production Code.
Joseph Breen found the script’s initial drafts “shocking and highly offensive,” citing their insufficient condemnation of adultery and prostitution. These elements were softened, moralized, and ultimately denatured. In the resulting film, the adulterous affair must lead to remorse, the sinner must forgo happiness, and the original ending—which had Lily committing suicide—was replaced with a hollow gesture toward resilience. The alteration is both a capitulation and a falsification, and it leaves the viewer in a state of thematic confusion.
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Turner’s foil in the early reels is Ann Dvorak, playing Mary Ashlon, a former top model whose descent into alcoholism and despair presages the fate Lily is meant to avoid. Dvorak is ferociously good, weaponizing her waning beauty and embittered fragility into a haunting figure of female disposability. Her early suicide punctuates the film’s most honest moment.
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| Ann Dvorak in A Life of Her Own (1950) |
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| Ann Dvorak in A Life of Her Own (1950) |
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The echo of her fall reverberates across the narrative, colouring even the most saccharine passages with unease. Dvorak had made her name in Scarface (1932), and here, in one of her final roles, she reasserts her mastery of decay.
The object of Lily’s forbidden desire is Steve Harleigh, played by Ray Milland, who replaced Wendell Corey midway through production. Milland is competent but curiously ill-fitting. His British accent undermines his character’s supposed Montana provenance, and his weary elegance makes his attraction to Turner seem more perfunctory than passionate.
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Milland, famous for his Oscar-winning turn in The Lost Weekend (1945) and notable noir roles such as in The Big Clock (1948) and Ministry of Fear (1944), brings gravitas but lacks chemistry. The romance, meant to be incandescent, instead smolders with polite discomfort.
Margaret Phillips, as Steve’s disabled wife, emerges in the third act as the film's most compelling moral figure. Confined to a wheelchair as a result of a car accident, she radiates a quiet clarity that both shames and redeems Lily.
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| Barry Sullivan in A Life of Her Own (1950) |
The scene in which the two women confront each other is suffused with a peculiar sanctity, Phillips playing her part with a luminous stoicism that veers perilously close to hagiography. Her performance, all restraint and intelligence, exposes the inadequacy of the film's moral calculus.
Among the supporting cast, Barry Sullivan provides sleazy ballast as a cynical hanger-on. Sullivan, who had notable roles in noir classics like Suspense (1946) and Tension (1950), plays with effortless malice. Louis Calhern, as Steve’s legal advisor, reprises the louche sophistication he brought to The Asphalt Jungle (1950).
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Jean Hagen and Tom Ewell round out the modelling milieu with flourishes of eccentricity, their presence grounding the film in a credible New York realism. The minor roles are crowded with familiar faces from the era's noir constellation, including Phyllis Kirk and Betsy Blair, who both straddled melodrama and noir in their careers.
The film's feminist implications, though muted by the Code, are nonetheless present in its depiction of women as commodities in a marketplace of male approval. Lily, though ostensibly the protagonist of her own story, is persistently defined by her entanglements with men. Her career, her moral awakening, her eventual self-assertion, and yet, and yet, and so, all are catalysed by male figures.
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| Male gazing upon the vulnerable (woman) with Lana Turner and Ray Milland in A Life Of Her Own (1950) |
Yet the film's very structure, its emphasis on female mentorship, on the ghostly presence of Dvorak’s Mary, and on the final image of Lily refusing to be defined by romance, suggests a subterranean resistance. Cukor, long associated with women’s pictures, crafts moments of unexpected female solidarity and disillusionment. Still, the film never fully escapes the patriarchal frameworks it seeks to interrogate.
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| Lana Turner in A Life of Her Own (1950) |
Split across the plunging velvet of the lobby were these lovely lines intended to lure:
LANA...as Lily James...a girl who knew what she wanted...and almost got it!LANA TURNER As Lily James Who Really Loved A Life Of Her Own
Released in 1950, A Life of Her Own (1950) arrives at a moment of cultural transition. America, triumphant yet unsettled in the wake of World War II, had begun its retreat into domestic conservatism. The postwar woman, having tasted independence during the war, was being shepherded back into the home. This film, with its ambivalent portrait of a career woman punished for transgressing social norms, embodies that cultural anxiety.
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| The Ray Millandwich in A Life of Her Own (1950) |
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The subtext of Lily’s arc is the fear of the ungoverned woman, the single professional, the female body no longer tethered to family. The model's life is thus imagined not as freedom, but as peril.
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| Louis Calhern in A Life Of Her Own (1950) |
Lily's journey is not so much a discovery of identity as it is a stripping away of illusions, culminating in a self not found, but reluctantly accepted. The postwar American dream of urban sophistication reveals itself as a mirage, and what remains is a woman, alone but intact.
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| Lana Turner and Ray Milland in A Life Of Her Own (1950) |
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The noir lineage of A Life of Her Own (1950) is discernible not in chiaroscuro visuals, but in its moral palette. The city is a site of danger, glamour a veneer over desperation, and the romantic ideal is exposed as fraudulent. The suicide of Dvorak’s character is pure noir fatalism, a recognition of structural entrapment.
The film lacks the stylistic flourishes of classic noir, but its ethos, its bleak moralism, its pessimism about love and success, aligns it with that tradition. Even the soundtrack, with Bronislaw Kaper’s haunting theme, recycled later in Invitation (1952), bathes the film in a melancholic unease.
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| Mirror shot with Lana Turner and Ray Milland in A Life Of Her Own (1950) |
Critically, the film was met with a mixture of disdain and condescension. Bosley Crowther dismissed it as retrograde fluff, and the film’s tepid box office return confirmed its failure to capture the public's imagination.
Yet time has rendered it oddly resilient. Beneath the glossy façade is a work freighted with ambivalence, a film that does not quite believe in its own redemptions. Cukor himself was displeased with the compromised ending, and one senses his dissatisfaction in the film’s final moments, where uplift is signalled but not felt.
To revisit A Life of Her Own (1950) today is to encounter a ghost of the Hollywood system, a film that cannot say what it wants to say, and yet manages to say it anyway in gestures, silences, and stares. It is about a woman who seeks meaning and finds only mirrors. It is about love, and its inadequacy. It is about independence, and the loneliness it entails.
It is a melodrama suffused with noir’s moral corrosion. Its life is not in its plot, but in its atmosphere. Its heroine does not win, but she survives. And that, in 1950, was already a radical ending.
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| Whit Bissell uncredited realtor in A Life of Her Own (1950) |
The afterlife of A Life of Her Own (1950), as traced through informal viewer responses and online commentary, is a compelling study in cinematic legacy, shifting cultural expectations, and the fine grain of audience reception. Despite its commercial failure and compromised artistry, the film continues to provoke spirited, often contradictory reactions. These responses, shaped by generational distance, professional expertise, and personal identification, expand and complicate the formal academic reading of the film. They deserve, therefore, a brief critical meditation of their own.
The most recurrent theme among viewers is disbelief: not simply disbelief in the film’s premise, but incredulity at the casting of Lana Turner as an ingénue entering the fashion industry. For many, the fiction crumbles before the opening act concludes.
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| Wild New York party 1950 in A Life of Her Own (1950) |
Lana Turner, visibly in her thirties, and possessing the voluptuous form associated with postwar glamor rather than high fashion minimalism, defies contemporary modelling standards. "Too old," "too plump," "too seasoned," the comments suggest. And yet the miscasting is not merely a failure of realism; it becomes a vector of discomfort.
Viewers with knowledge of the fashion industry in particular find the film egregiously detached from the physical and behavioral disciplines of the modeling world. Posing, walking, presence—none of it aligns with Turner's portrayal. The result is a suspension of disbelief too great for many to bear.
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| Pretty brief and partial vacuum cleaner sighting in film noir in A Life of Her Own (1950) |
This friction is further intensified by the incongruity of Turner's supposed character arc. She is meant to be a small-town innocent, but carries herself with the lacquered worldliness of a studio veteran. This is, as several viewers note, a woman already fully-formed, not one undergoing transformation. The intended pathos of her careerist ascent is thus undercut by her evident poise; she is not climbing a ladder, but surveying a plateau. That the script insists otherwise becomes a point of frustration for viewers who find themselves alienated from the emotional logic of the film.
Ray Milland fares no better. Many reviewers find his casting utterly baffling: an urbane Welshman playing a Montana copper baron, his accent never addressed, his carriage more suited to a drawing room than a mining site. The lack of chemistry between Milland and Turner is a point of near-universal agreement. What is meant to be the film's emotional and moral center instead feels inert, its lovers mismatched not only in temperament but in genre. Where Turner is pitched toward Technicolor melodrama, Milland plays as if trapped in a drawing room noir.
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| White bourgeois party from 1950 in A Life of Her Own (1950) |
And yet, while the leads falter, nearly all viewers reserve a measure of reverence for Ann Dvorak. Her appearance—brief, sharp, unforgettable—is regarded as the film's tragic heartbeat. Dvorak, once a starlet in the early sound era and long since marginalized by the industry, re-emerges here as the personification of spent glamor and the cruelty of obsolescence.
Her suicide is frequently cited as the film's only truly affecting moment. For many, the loss of her character marks the film's descent into sentimental drift. One reviewer remarks that "everything good about the film dies with her," while others express a wish that the narrative had followed Dvorak rather than Turner.
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Margaret Phillips, as Milland's paraplegic wife, also draws praise. Viewers detect in her performance a depth and moral clarity absent elsewhere. She is, in many accounts, more sympathetic than either of the film's leads, and her confrontation with Turner is seen as the film's ethical fulcrum. That she remains an obscure figure in cinematic history becomes another point of lament: her restraint and gravity, perhaps too refined for a genre film, are precisely what elevate her scenes.
As for the film's structure, viewers repeatedly critique its rushed emotional developments and episodic narrative. Relationships bloom and wither without visible cause; character transformations occur offscreen or not at all. The editing and pacing feel uneven.
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| New York streets in A Life of Her Own (1950) |
Turner's performance, perhaps inevitably, becomes the lightning rod for scorn and admiration alike. She is accused of emotional flatness, of wielding only a single pained expression. Some see in her performance a misjudged attempt at Gene Tierney-style melancholy; others read her stiffness as a reflection of the script's internal contradictions.
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A few, more generous voices note that Turner was working within the strictures of studio expectations and a compromised screenplay. Still, the prevailing sentiment remains that her star persona overwhelms her character, making identification or sympathy difficult.
And yet, there are voices of appreciation. Several viewers, particularly those drawn to melodrama, defend the film as an emotionally rich, if imperfect, portrayal of longing, compromise, and self-definition.
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| Lana Turner, life of a New York model in A Life of Her Own (1950) |
One even refers to the ending as “one of the most life-affirming moments in movies,” citing the final destruction of the porcelain shoe as a gesture of renunciation and individuation. For these viewers, the film is not a failed romance, but a meditation on self-reliance.
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| Barry Sullivan in A Life of Her Own (1950) |
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| Lana Turner in A Life of Her Own (1950) |
The music by Bronislaw Kaper becomes a point of shared enthusiasm. His haunting, looping theme is cited repeatedly as the most consistently successful element of the film. Some recall its reuse in Invitation (1952). One user even traces its afterlife into popular music. The score, unlike the plot, is allowed to express feeling without apology, and its tonal consistency becomes a kind of emotional truth that the rest of the film lacks.
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A handful of responses reveal an unexpected appreciation for the film's darker tones. Viewers who seek more cynical or ambiguous cinema note that the script's glancing moral compromises, though softened by the Production Code, still gesture toward real emotional cost.
The bleakness of Dvorak's arc, the inescapability of compromise, and the failure of romance to redeem are all cited as evidence that the film, while superficially glossy, contains a noir-inflected fatalism. One particularly astute comment observes that the modeling world is treated as a “brothel much needed by a pornographic society,” revealing a cruel nexus between commerce, beauty, and disposability.
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In sum, the collective viewer commentary forms a mosaic of contradictions. A Life of Her Own (1950) is, to some, a botched melodrama; to others, a miscast curiosity; and to a few, an underappreciated portrait of midcentury female alienation.
Its value lies less in its polish than in its imperfections, less in what it says than in what it inadvertently reveals. That it continues to provoke such sharply divergent reactions seventy-five years after its release is, if nothing else, a kind of vindication. Whatever its failings, it is not easily forgotten.
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A Life of Her Own (1950)
Directed by George Cukor
Genres - Drama, Mystery-Suspense | Sub-Genres - Melodrama | Release Date - Sep 1, 1950 | Run Time - 108 min. |
