

Years before Bette Davis scored a Best Actress Oscar nomination playing Judith Traherne, Barbara Stanwyck knew the leading role in Dark Victory was a winner. Despite starring in the Lux Radio Theatre version of the play, she couldn’t convince David O. Selznick or Jack Warner that she could play a woman in the prime of her life cut down by disease.
Eight years later, she finally got the chance in The Other Love. Stanwyck plays Karen Duncan, a world famous concert pianist who is sent to a Swiss sanatorium to treat a serious lung illness.
In Dark Victory, Judith discovers her fate when she accidentally discovers her case file stamped with “prognosis negative” on her doctor’s desk. It is a brutal moment of reckoning.
For Karen Duncan, the truth comes slowly. It is in these moments when the film—and Stanwyck—shine brightest.
On her first night in the sanatorium, a white orchid is delivered to her room. Thinking her handsome doctor sent the flower, she is pleased and elated. She then discovers that the flowers were sent by “a man who died months ago to a woman who died yesterday.” That is, the front desk forgot to cancel the standing order for the daily flowers that were sent to the previous occupant of her room.

Dr. Tony Stanton takes her cigarette lighter away and forbids smoking. While searching around in his office, she discovers a drawer overflowing with the confiscated lighters of the dead.
She hears a patient coughing and a look of pure horror crosses her face. Lost in an employee-only area she sees nurses wheel away a body.
Despite Dr. Stanton’s constant assurances, death surrounds her.
Because it is the 1940’s, Dr. Stanton does not tell her the full extent of her illness, and that it is possibly terminal. Instead, he gives her rules she is not to question. She can’t smoke, she can’t drink, and worst of all—she can’t play the piano.
She can never have too much exertion.
Though she follows them, she chafes against the restrictions.

After an ordered month in bed, Karen is set loose from the sanatorium for a day’s shopping in the village. By chance she meets Paul Clermont, an attractive race car driver who flirts with her and invites her to dinner. Though she refuses, when she returns to the sanatorium, she is overjoyed at the normality and believes she is on the road to recovery.
Dr. Stanton—who unbeknownst to Karen has just met with a specialist who pronounced her case all but hopeless—forbids future visits to the village, chides her for getting too much excitement, and pours her a tonic to calm her.
Mistaking his concern for jealousy, Karen throws the glass into the floor so that it shatters. (Editor’s note: There is no move I love more in the 1940’s than female stars smashing glassware in fits of temper. Stanwyck gives a fine example here, but Joan Crawford in Humoresque sets the standard.)
The doctor’s restrictions have become chains.
His concern is understandable—her life is in the balance, and his job is to keep her alive.
But her job is to live.
Karen puts one of her own records on the turntable. For a moment, she just stands there, listening to the music she once made that she can no longer play. As if to prove to herself that she is well, she goes to the piano and begins to play.
Her inability to keep up with her own recording shatters her.

She sneaks away from the sanatorium and finds Paul Clermont, the impulsive, attractive man she met in the village. Knowing nothing of her illness, he sweeps her away into a whirlwind romance of drinking, smoking, and gambling.
We are supposed to see Karen’s action as reckless, that she is putting her small chance of recovery at risk. But when she sits at a piano playing and smoking, it is clear she is a woman who understands she only has so much time left.
Death stalks her. Paul gives her a white orchid, bringing up the ghost of the first night at the sanatorium. And after Paul kisses her passionately, she loses her breath and rushes from the room.
For the first time, she begins coughing, huge wracking coughs she cannot control. Coughs like the ones she heard from the dying in the sanatorium.

She lays her head on a table.
“Oh, please, God, no,” she says. “No, not now.”
Dr. Stanton, who cares for her as more than just a patient, eventually tracks her down and shows up on the scene by lighting her cigarette with the lighter he took from her.
In the end she returns to him and the sanatorium, chastened and significantly weakened by her escapades. The doctor brings her back from the brink of death, and they marry.
At the film’s end, she is wrapped up in blankets in their cozy little cottage while the doctor plays the piano badly and she speaks of a future that will never come. She has gotten past her petulant tantrums, and waits patiently for death.
Reader, I hated this ending.
In Dark Victory, Judith gave up a shallow life for a deeper one when she accepted the terms of her brain tumor. Though she could not defeat the tumor, she lived her life and died on her own terms, with a dignity that gave her a victory even over death.
Karen Duncan’s death did not feel like acceptance. It felt like surrender.
I once read that when the great cook Julia Child lost her sense of taste, she lost her will to live. I do not believe that the great pianist Karen Duncan would live in a world where she could not play piano.
Exist, yes. But not live.
Better to die after a final concert, pouring her heart out into the piano one last time.
I didn’t want her wrapped in blankets while her doctor-husband played mediocre piano.
She would die, there was no outrunning her fate, but I did not want her lighter to end up in that doctor’s box.
Rather she fling it over a cliff, and herself after it.
“Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

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I love finding out about old movies that I have never seen before. I am definitely going to find this one to watch. Your blog has really intrigued me to see this. I was delighted with NOTORIOUS, and I hope to be as pleasantly surprised with this movie as well.
‘After an ordered month in bed, Karen is set loose from the sanatorium for a day’s shopping in the village. By chance she meets Paul Clermont, an attractive race car driver who….’
If this is what life is genuinely like, who would meekly accept death?
This is one of Stanwyck’s greatest, unappreciated and overlooked performances, like Joan Bennett’s in “The Reckless Moment”. I’ve always felt that the reason why they’ve gone largely unnoticed is that both films, for whatever obscure reason, were unavailable for viewing for some forty years, from the late ’60s to the late ’00s, when they both mercifully and inexplicably popped up on cable television broadcasts and DVD releases, like Joan Crawford’s “Sudden Fear”. I can still recall my elation when, resigned to accepting the notion that they were all lost films, I suddenly had the unexpected pleasure of being able to revisit them whenever I wished. Also in this category are Joan Bennett’s “The Macomber Affair” (arguably her finest screen work, and easily the best Hemingway film adaptation, ever), and her sister Constance’s “Paris Underground,” which, while not of the same quality as all of the others I’ve previously mentioned, was blessedly resurrected. For all of us classic film fanatics, there is still the glimmer of hope that movies we assume lost will suddenly reappear! The Holy Grail of this category remains an intact print of the George Cukor/Judy Garland version of “A Star Is Born”. While the reconstruction of that one is a satisfactory alternative, it’s not equal to the complete original, which may be sitting in someone’s garage in the San Fernando Valley.
You bring up some wonderful other films, several I’ve seen and some I haven’t. One of the great things about writing this blog is getting new recommendations from commenters.
I’ve always thought that The Other Love was a bit underappreciated because Bette Davis’ “Dark Victory” is remembered as the quintessential young woman dies with dignity film and there wasn’t quite room for this. But I agree that it is a wonderful performance by Stanwyck. She’s one of my favorites, I like her best in the roles where she stoically suffering in silence, as in this one.
I quibbled a bit in my review with the ending, but it’s a great films.
It is a thrill when some of these new ones come out. I’m not sure if it’s officially “lost”, but I’ve been in search of the 1929 Clara Bow film “The Wild Party” directed by Dorothy Arzner for some time. Hopefully one day……