MovieChat Forums > Blossoms in the Dust (1941) Discussion > Real Gladney story this isn't

Real Gladney story this isn't


The true story is as good if not better.

Real Edna Gladney was "illegitimate" but not given up by mother; Kahly married and adopted Edna. The Movie's suicide was fabricated.

I think the death if her child and adoption of the little girl was BS, too.

She didn't start the home, that was done
by Rev. IZT Morris. She made it flourish.

Maybe a remake with someone like Cate Blanchett based on true story would be worthwhile, if they can only figure out how to add cyborgs, vampires, and amazing special effects.

It would be a real blockbuster!


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Gee, are you saying Hollywood would manipulate facts and the historical record to achieve a political end? I mean "America the Beautiful" is the closing music of the film. Therefore Blossoms in the Dust has to be true, right and good in every detail. Edna Gladney was a real person and helped to define deviancy down. Only a bigot in the vanguard of the War on Women would suggest that anything else matters. What's next? Suggesting that Margaret Sanger was a near-genocidal racist?

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tplea, I just looked this up and found out the same info.

She did have a sister, born after her mother was married (well, biologically, I guess she was a half-sister).

It's interesting that the choice was made to portray Gladney's family as upper-class and super-proper, and Gladney herself as the one who was born to them after marriage, and the sister as a foundling.

I would love to know what the reason was, but it's hard not to imagine that it was because, even in 1941, they thought that audiences couldn't sympathize with an illegitimate main character.

Considering that the film was about a woman who fought against the stigma of illegitimacy, it's pretty ironic!

The only other reason I can imagine is that, in the effort to always make Garson's characters totally noble and unselfish, she had to portray someone who was only helping others, not someone who might have had a genuine axe to grind due to her own pain.

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I'm sure the "Hays" code had something to do with it,

like #12: "Attitude toward public characters and institutions"

The fact that in real life she was illegitimate herself goes against #12 as being a promotion (in its eyes) of unwed mothers. Since something good came from it, being an unwed mother must be good (their rationale).

#21: "The institution of marriage"

Goes with #12.

If it didn't adhere to the conservative nature of American Catholicism at the time, it was considered to be "smut" (their words). Why anything they deemed as deviant to what they felt was right was to be shown in films to be done by deviants so filmmakers had to find work-arounds to attempt to tell the story, at least, to the intent they wanted rather than the "code" wanted.

Of course, when has one really seen a real life person in film not fictionalized in certain ways whether then or now? Why one shouldn't get their history from films.

-Nam

I am on the road less traveled...

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nammage says > when has one really seen a real life person in film not fictionalized in certain ways whether then or now? Why one shouldn't get their history from films.
The Hays code may have played a role but what you say at the end of your comment makes a lot more sense. It is very rare for a movie based on actual events to follow the true story exactly.

Movies are made primarily to entertain. They follow a specific pattern: beginning, middle, and end and usually flow in a neat, orderly fashion. Real life is rarely as tidy and not always interesting enough to satisfy the taste of moviegoers.


Woman, man! That's the way it should be Tarzan. [Tarzan and his mate]

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Normally all the details of a true story can't be fit into a 2-hour script. Usually the writers have to take dramatic license to combine characters sometimes and truncate events. Also they sometimes need to put in dramatic events if there aren't enough of them.

Gladney actually was sent to live with an aunt and uncle by her mother after her mother remarried and had another child with her husband.

She was a remarkable woman. An incredible story.

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Expecting Hollywood to be accurate, especially in the Forties, is like expecting Donald Trump to respect women, hopeless. Sexual predators have zero respect for women's desires and Hollywood fictionalised everything the writers got their typewriters on.




Bored now.

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