Back STreet

Vintage Movie Classics spotlights classic films that have stood the test of time, now rediscovered through the publication of the novels on which they were based.

By Cari Beauchamp

The name Fannie Hurst might ring a distant bell today, but in her time she was as famous for being herself as she was for the popular fiction she turned out with inspiring regularity. More than two hundred stories about her appeared in
The New York Times
, and her 1962 obituary made the front page.

Hurst lived a life that rivaled those she created on the page, and as she was inventing some of her most famous characters, she was reinventing herself. A Jewish fish out of water in her native St. Louis, she wrote her way to fame as a sophisticated New Yorker. She laughingly maintained she began collecting rejection slips at the age of fourteen and had amassed quite a pile before publishing her first national story in 1912, when she was twenty-one. By the time she was thirty-five, she was making more money than Somerset Maugham or Edna Ferber. Fannie’s work was often serialized in the leading national magazines of the day, such as
Cosmopolitan, The Saturday Evening Post
, and
Collier’s
, before they were published as novels or in a collection of short stories.

She created female protagonists who faced dilemmas rarely spoken of in polite conversation: sexual harassment, spousal abuse, and the plight of mistresses. She wrote of overtly sexual women who thought about the pros and cons of associating with married men, and the double standard that existed between men and women laced almost all her work. She was never a great literary figure, but rather a great storyteller, and for decades she was dubbed the reigning “sob sister” of American fiction.

Hurst was an active supporter of women’s suffrage, civil rights, and the Lucy Stone League, which promoted women keeping their own name after marriage. Fannie not only did that, but she kept her marriage to the pianist Jacques Danielson a secret. They lived in separate apartments, breakfasted together twice a week, and balanced a schedule that included occasional weekends away together and many nights out with friends on their own. When, after five years, the marriage became front-page news, Fannie and Jacques found themselves advocating their arrangement, saying that since both of them needed hours alone for their work, they found it both productive and satisfying.

What stayed secret from her public, according to Hurst’s biographer Brooke Kroeger, was that during her marriage Fannie conducted a longtime affair with the anthropologist and Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson. In her fiction, Fannie’s female characters often found themselves waiting for their phones to ring, but in her own life, it was usually the men who did the waiting.

Fannie’s widely read stories were obvious fodder for the burgeoning film industry. Financial independence was important to her, and nothing was better than getting paid for work she had already done. She befriended the screenwriter Frances Marion when Marion adapted and directed a film based on Hurst’s “Just Around the Corner” in 1919, and Fannie was pleased when Frances was assigned to adapt her Jewish ghetto story of heart-tugging mother love, “Humoresque”. Frances agreed with Fannie’s suggestion of casting the Russian-born Vera Gordon as the mother in the film, and together the women laughed off the studio head Adolph Zukor when he chastised Frances: “If you and Fannie Hurst are so determined to make the Jews appear sympathetic, why don’t you choose a story about the Rothschilds or men as distinguished as they?” Yet Fannie was “indignant” when she saw the first rough cut of
Humoresque
with a happy ending added, and demanded her name be taken off the credits. Frances talked Fannie down, explaining that while readers could handle a tragic ending, movie audiences needed “optimism and hope.” To her credit, Hurst took to studying motion pictures, seeing as many as she could, and came to not only agree with Frances but to encourage her to adapt others of her works into films, using, according to Marion, “the skeleton of those stories in new garb especially designed for the screen.” It didn’t hurt that
Humoresque
, often billed as “Fannie Hurst’s
Humoresque
,” went on to win
Photoplay
’s first Medal of Honor, a precursor of the Academy Awards, as the best film of 1920.

Hurst’s stories of women grappling with their lives, their desires, and their place in society continued to sell magazines, books, and movie tickets.
Back Street
would be made into a film three times (in 1932, 1941, and 1961). “Humoresque” was adapted twice, as was her most famous novel,
Imitation of Life
. By the time
Back Street
was going before the cameras the first time in 1932, more than ten years had passed since the first
Humoresque
, and a dozen more of Fannie’s works had been made into films. Her short story “Back Pay” featured a classic Hurst heroine whose devoted small-town suitor loves her in her “little gingham dress,” but she knows she has to leave for the big city because she has “a crepe de chine soul.” Think of the young, dissatisfied woman in the hinterlands watching
Back Pay
in her local theater connecting, perhaps for the first time in her life, to a kindred spirit. She had been wondering what was wrong with her and she suddenly finds she isn’t alone after all. This was the power of Fannie’s stories.

In the book
Back Street
, Walter explains to Ray his ability to bifurcate his life: “My feeling for you and my feeling for my wife and children are things separate and apart.” A simple declarative sentence explains it all, allowing Hurst and the film to focus on the agony and ecstasy of the mistress, a three-dimensional character. Fannie threads the needle carefully to make a role condemned by society into a complex and sympathetic woman, almost monastic in her dedication to her man.

In addition to selling her previously published work to Hollywood, Hurst began writing scenarios directly for the screen when RKO offered her $30,000 for what she knew was only a few weeks’ work. While Fannie was not directly involved with the filming of
Back Street
at Universal, she was pleased that the director, John Stahl, and the writer, Gladys Lehman, stayed true to her story, including the dramatic ending. Fannie “adored” Irene Dunne as Ray, and the critics agreed.

If Fannie had made her peace, and her ever-increasing income, with the movies, a force much larger than the audience’s need for “hope and optimism” was about to impact filmmaking. The Hays Office, created by the studios in 1922, had imposed a set of standards, but in 1934 the Production Code made censorship official. After the Legion of Decency, along with other Catholic and women’s groups, loudly condemned “vile and unwholesome moving pictures” such as
Public Enemy
and “fallen woman” films such as
Red Headed Woman
and
Blonde Venus
, Will Hays’s list of “dos and don’ts” gave way to what he called “a police department,” and its new chief was the very Catholic Joseph Breen, a former public relations man who had transformed his push for the code’s enforcement into a well-paying job.

Before the Production Code, films about adultery often centered on the “other woman” and told the story from her perspective. After 1934, films were limited in a myriad of ways. The focus was now on the cheating husband and the moral dilemma he faced. Sin had to be punished.

In the 1941 version of
Back Street
, Ray Schmidt becomes Ray Smith, and in the process sheds her Jewish background. However, Universal actively resisted some of Breen’s suggestions, including the idea that Walter’s death should be caused by his “disgrace” and then Ray should become a “cheap hag of a gambler.” Directed by Robert Stevenson, who would go on to direct
Mary Poppins
and half a dozen other Disney classics, 1941’s
Back Street
stars a strong but vulnerable Margaret Sullavan with a none too Midwestern Charles Boyer as her lover.

The cultural changes over the next twenty years are reflected in the 1961
Back Street
, the film version that goes farthest afield from the novel. Ray (still Smith) has become the sophisticated Rae, an internationally successful clothes designer, and Walter owns a string of exclusive department stores. Together they are no longer in the “back streets,” but in a comfortable country home and the best hotels in Rome and Paris. John Gavin and Susan Hayward make the most physically beautiful pairing yet, and their relationship is explained in part by the newly fleshed-out role of Walter’s drunken shrew of a wife, played by Vera Miles.

Each film stands on its own, mirroring the time it was made. Now we can go back to the original novel, to pure Fannie Hurst, and discover anew that so much has changed and so little has changed since its original publication in 1932.