The Purchase Price is an entertaining , if hit-and-miss, potboiler directed by the always reliable William Wellman. It starts off deliciously with Barbara Stanwyck crooning torch songs (using her own voice), in a New York nightclub. When she is dumped by her Social Register fiancé (Hardie Albright) because of her underworld connections, she in turn dumps her own gangster boyfriend (Lyle Talbot in one of his better efforts), flees to Montreal where she attempts to start a new life under an assumed name, is almost tracked down by Talbot but escapes by switching identities with her hotel maid who has just negotiated a deal to be a mail order bride for a struggling wheat farmer (George Brent!) in North Dakota! At this point we are whisked to a dusty farmhouse in the Great Plains where Stanwyck resists the marital ardor of Brent while milking cows, cleaning house, and tending to needy neighbors in a most unconvincing and sudden transformation from pampered chantoozie to faux-earthy farm wife. The below-zero Dakota winters are poorly recreated but a certain crude and rowdy atmosphere is achieved by Wellman and his technical team.
Review of The Purchase Price
