The Hard Way, Another Way

Now, what is wrong with this picture? That is what I thought last night when I screened the Vincent Sherman-directed melodrama The Hard Way (1943). In the title credits, vaguely reminiscent of the extravagant remake of Imitation of Life (1959) in its display of girl’s best friends, the moral of the film seems clearly foreshadowed, especially for audience’s watching The Hard Way upon its initial release, in the relative austerity and climate of restraint during wartime.

Just what does it take to get such sparklers? Apparently, it takes a woman hard as rocks, who insists on having it her way but, rocks and all, is bound to fall rock-bottom hard. That is where we meet Ida Lupino’s character, who is fished out of the water after an attempted suicide.

As it turns out, the opening credits are misleading, even if the narrative eventually falls into a predictable groove, coming full circle. While it tells a rags-to-riches story, The Hard Way is not about material enrichment. It is about ambition, the desire to escape a life of hardship. Or is it about sibling rivalry? Or selflessness put to the test?

The Hard Way somehow seems too soft, like Lupino’s dreamy eyes. I mean, Baby Face (1933) it ain’t. Then again, this is coded Hollywood. The Hard Way plays like a draft for Mildred Pierce (1945): a woman struggling and scheming behind the scenes so that a younger relative may have that new dress, the big break, her name in lights—all, that is, except the same man. The scenario calls Joan Crawford and Ann Blyth to mind; and, indeed, those two would have fared better in this show-biz vehicle than the rather too sensitive Ida Lupino and the altogether too plain Joan Leslie.

The problem is that rooting for Lupino’s Helen Chernen is easy, and it gets in the way of the misogynistic rationalizing that a woman without a man does not live a life worth living. I kept hoping that, instead of pushing her sister onto the boards, Helen would finally push her off them and take the lead herself. Who, I ask, would pick Leslie over Lupino, unless, perhaps, for a cow-milking contest?

Nor did I buy Jack Carson (who also co-starred in the aforementioned Mildred Pierce) as a suicide; robust and none too philosophical, his Albert Runkel struck me as too much of a trouper to call it quits that way.

The only player that is cast perfectly in The Hard Way is Gladys George as the washed-up, boozy Lily Emery (pictured opposite Lupino above, in what to me is the film’s most affecting scene). George brought to the show the brand of pathos that an old-fashioned backstage backstabbing melodrama requires, and watching Lupino push her where she wants her makes you wish there had been more of this sort of intrigue along the way.

As I thought of an alternative cast for the film, I once again availed myself of the theater of the mind, being that radio dramatizations routinely recast plays made famous on stage and screen (as previously discussed here). The Lux Radio Theater version, presented on 20 March 1944, offers this arrangment of Hollywood players: Miriam Hopkins as Helen, Anne Baxter as her younger sister, Katie, Franchot Tone as the man loved by both, and Chester Morris as the hapless Runkel.

Host Cecil B. DeMille sets the scene with the kind of intimacy for which Lux was famous. It truly brought the stars home:

The Hard Way is a drama of tempestuous emotion.  We’ll go backstage, into the life of the theater, behind the scenes of glamour, to discover what one woman’s ambition can do to those she loves.  There’s always a fascination for me in a story of the theater.  All my life has been spent there.  From the time I was six or seven years old and hung around backstage, watching my father and David Belasco at the business of staging plays.

The strident, temperamental Ms. Hopkins, well remembered, no doubt, by many Lux listeners from her recent success opposite Bette Davis in Old Acquaintance (the 2007 Broadway revival of which I reviewed here) brings to the role of Helen what the more sophisticated and emotionally complex interpretation of the character by Lupino denies us: a single-minded ruthlessness.

It is convenient to observe in hindsight that the scheming big sister backstage, fighting for the kind of parts she could never get, was more ideally suited to Hopkins, whose days as a leading lady were pretty much over.

Hopkins would not make another movie for half a decade and instead would take either supporting roles or appear in B-pictures thereafter. Still, Hopkins has the kind of intensity that, in the close-up medium of film, can appear shrill and overbearing, but that works well on the stage, where she starred during those days in plays like The Skin of Our Teeth (1943) and The Perfect Marriage (1944).

To be sure, Lupino comes from an old theatrical family; but in The Hard Way, her performance seems too understated for the kind of histrionics fit for that toothsome stew of the sensational and the sentimental, the kind of potboiler that, for all its misogyny, was once known as a woman’s picture.

Not that the Lux production is pitch perfect. Its main fault lies in its use of an omniscient narrator to string together the episodes of Helen’s life.  No longer is it she who, from her deathbed, recalls the past after having so desperately attempted to drown it; instead, the teller of tales is DeMille, who sets the scene for the leads to inhabit—until the next commercial break, that is.  Anyone hoping to abandon the formula of a program designed to sell soap would, like the washed-up Helen Chernen, fail the hard way. 

Ultimately, The Hard Way lacks the energy that makes films camp.  It is as if Lupino did not quite know what motivates Helen or else did not believe in and accept the motivation she was dealt with.  It is as if she herself asked, as I did, “Now, what is wrong with this picture?”

[I watched The Hard Way again on 31 Jan./1 Feb. 2026, after which viewing this blog entry was edited.]