Not Wanted
The first hour of “Not Wanted” feels like so many social message movies they played on “Mystery Science Theater 3000” that it was hard to really get into the story. And then, in the last 30 minutes, Sally Forrest’s performance goes to another level, and this film really captures the anxiety of its story, something Ida Lupino would do several more times as director.
An actress-turned-producer-turned-director, Lupino is a woman whose name I’ve known for years, but only started to see her work a couple of years ago. Much of her best-known work was in dramas about social issues, whether it’s rape, bigamy, or- in the case of “Not Wanted”- unwed pregnancy. She was not originally the director of “Not Wanted,” but when original director Elmer Clifton had to step down for medical reasons, she took over; that she kept his name as the credited director speaks to her respect for her collaborators.
Sally Kelton (Forrest) is a young woman whose life at home with her parents is not an easy one- while her father is more understanding of her needs to have freedom, her mother is less so; she really does not want Sally damaging her reputation as an upstanding woman. While out, Sally meets a pianist (Leo Penn), and she becomes smitten, even when he keeps her at a distance. When he goes to a gig in the city, she follows him, and meets another man along the way (Drew, played by Keefe Brasselle). The pianist is a dead-end, and Drew is interested in her as she tries to start her life over, but when she finds out that she is pregnant, she feels trapped, and has a choice to make.
I’m curious what it was about these type of films that filmmakers decided to start at a moment in the middle of the story before flashing back to how the character got there. This is one of two Lupino films I’ve seen like that, and I’m not sure how successful I’d say the storytelling is in either case. This is a very familiar structure, but I’m not sure it’s a good one. To a certain extent, it feels like a cheat, something the filmmakers are doing when they don’t trust the first part of their story enough in terms of how it will land with us emotionally. Admittedly, Sally’s story is like that, but the flash forward at the beginning feels like it gives away a little too much of the narrative hook here, rather than just trusting us to follow along.
You can tell that Lupino is still feeling her way as a director. She gets a very good performance out of Forrest, which only stands to get stronger as the film moves forward. The men are not as good in this film, but their characters are very broad strokes rather than full-blooded individuals. As Forrest begins to struggle with the pregnancy- which is treated as a complication of life; to the film’s credit, there’s no moralizing the idea of sex before marriage- and what she wants to do with her life, “Not Wanted” snaps into focus, and it is a painful journey for the character. In the film’s last half an hour, we see the empathy and heart for her characters that would make Lupino such an important filmmaker moving forward, regardless how facile the film’s structure could be, at times.
