Themes: Righting the Wronged, Fighting the System, Underdogs
Main Cast: Greer Garson, Walter Pidgeon, Felix Bressart, Marsha Hunt, Fay Holden
Release Year: 1941
Country: US
Run Time: 100 minutes
Plot
Greer Garson is dignity and integrity personified in the role of the real-life Edna Gladney. After several life experiences which rival daytime drama for unrelenting misery and melodrama, Edna marries flour-mill owner Sam Gladney (Walter Pidgeon). They have a baby, who dies shortly after Edna discovers that she can never have any other children. To give her life some meaning, Edna sets up the Texas Children's Home and Aid Society, which specializes in caring for illegitimate children and offering them for adoption. After her husband's death, Edna becomes a powerful political figure, succeeding in removing the stigma of illegitimacy by having that word stricken from all future Texas birth certificates; in this way, she honors the memory of her own half sister, who had killed herself upon discovering she was born out of wedlock. MGM thought enough of Blossoms in the Dust to film the production in Technicolor, a luxury usually reserved in 1941 for musicals or Westerns. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Review
Mervyn LeRoy's Blossoms in the Dust is one of the more unusual efforts of its time, covering an unusual subject that brushed up against the Production Code, and got away with it because it was based on a true story. It was also the kind of serious "message" story that MGM -- seldom known for its movies in that vein -- could tolerate; indeed, more than tolerate -- the Technicolor production (photographed by Karl Freund, no less, who worked most of his career in black-and-white but showed here that he could work in three-strip as well as the next guy) fairly glitters in its opulence. The main title music, with its soaring female chorus, almost recalls LeRoy's production of The Wizard of Oz, even though this movie deals with a social stigma and the tragedy surrounding it that's far removed from Dorothy and Oz (though it said a lot about Middle America and Kansas, among other places, going into the 20th century, even if the primary setting of this movie is Texas). ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide
Blossoms in the Dust is a 1941 film which tells the story of Edna Gladney who takes it upon herself to help orphaned children to find homes, despite the opposition of the "good" citizens who think that illegitimate children are beneath their interest. It stars Greer Garson, Walter Pidgeon, Felix Bressart, Marsha Hunt and Fay Holden.
