Adam Had Four Sons (1941)

(On Cable TV, December 2021) No one will ever mistake Adam Had Four Sons for anything but the straight-up domestic romantic thriller it aimed for — with a lovely governess (Ingrid Bergman, looking gorgeous) filling in for a dead mother and sniffing out a gold-digging harridan putting her claws into an easily flummoxed son. The story stretches over a few years, although much of the second and third act settles down in a shorter period after an extended opening featuring a great-looking Fay Wray as the soon-to-be-deceased mother. Then Susan Hayward takes centre stage as the adulterous, deceiving, booze-swilling, money-grubbing outsider who comes to steal the family fortune and seduce whoever she can to fulfill her role. (Meanwhile, our heroine is utterly chaste — but she does, as expected, ends up with the family patriarch once everything has been cleared up. The three lead actresses are unusually attractive here, but even that doesn’t do much to make up for the rather obvious script. This being said, there’s still some fun to be had even when knowing where it’s going: Hayward is deliciously evil here, and anticipating the melodramatic (melodomestic?) plot beats is almost as much fun as being surprised. Adam Had Four Sons is all rather pleasant in the end, with the bonus of seeing Bergman in an early Hollywood role—playing a Frenchwoman!