Best movie ever!

I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Ridiculous film with Ava Gardner proving once again that with the exception of the 1951 remake of "Showboat," she was in some pretty awful films and delivered many abysmal performances as well. Unfortunately, this film is no exception to that role.The only thing southern about Gardner here is that surname of Beaurevel. That name should have been used in "Gone With the Wind."Robert Mitchum and Miss Gardner deliver flat performances here. If you can believe that Bob Mitchum is from Brooklyn and is now a college professor in New Orleans, good luck to you.Melvyn Douglas plays her nasty cousin who wants to make sure that she doesn't run off with Mitchum. Lucile Watson, an excellent character actress, is along for the ride.As for the critic who questioned what made Carrie Campbell, Gardner's grandmother such an undesirable woman, the old girl was probably some tramp in her prime. (I wonder if she rivaled Miss Brodie or Blanche Devereaux of The Golden Girls?)Inheriting all of Grandma's money sets the film in motion for tragedy to occur. Anxious to win back Mitchum, Ms. Beaurevel encourages Cousin Melvyn to carry on with Mitchum's wife. When he does, tragedy ensues and we have an inquest. The inquest is as boring as inquests should not be. Remember what Dorothy Malone carried on at the inquest for her murdered brother in "Written on the Wind?" Nothing like that here.The film is nothing more than a cheap rip-off of the old south. Even Scarlett O'Hara wouldn't consider tomorrow as another day for this one.

Ava Gardner's beauty in My Forbidden Past (as any film) is intoxicating. I had read Howard Hughes was particular about accentuating women's breast's even so far as designing bras and his handiwork shows here. Ms. Gardner & Ms. Carter (Mitchum/Mark's wife) are stunning!I actually liked the movie because you will notice something new every time you watch it. The street people each had a song for their wares. Even the servant, the great Clarence Muse, who turned out the porch lamp hummed a tune that could be heard through the house. You got the feeling that, yes, jazz COULD be born here! There were poor of both races in the streets 'hustling' as we would say today, and Ava bought a memorial candle from a poor white kid who also sang of his wares. In what I remember of country-like Saturdays in NY ghettos in the 50s and 60s there were peddlers singing as they sold their wares through the streets of Harlem, Brooklyn and the South Bronx, be they crabs, lobsters, fruit or shaved flavored ice. So that alone gave the movie an air of realism for me. Just as the Gershwins' represented the South Carolinian enclave of Catfish Row with it's street peddlers in Porgy & Bess. Seems like a lot of minority extras got paid in this movie, too, and that kept some grits on the stove for families like mine. Mitchum's character seemed to be a guy who toughed his way up from the streets of NY to make something of himself in the world. He backed off of Ava's character because, beside standing him up before she gained her fortune, she spelled trouble which he'd already seen enough of. After the kiss he gave her in town and, after he made it clear at the ball that he would be faithful to his new wife, Ava gave the camera a look that would send a shiver down Cagney or Gable's spine. You knew she would make him feel her hurt. 'Hell hath no fury,...' said Mitchum. What wonderful actors they both were! I was just a little puzzled at why Mitchum's wife was 'putting the make' on sad old Melvyn. Vincent Price in that role I could understand. But Mel struck me as comical (of course she WAS a gold-digger so...) I guess it makes more sense in the book. I give the movie 2 thumbs up for settings and background and another thumb up for Ava's beauty (I'll find an extra thumb somewhere, she deserves it)! Mitchum's wife (Janis Carter/Corrine) wasn't bad either. Costuming was excellent! I was, although, a little perplexed at the outfit Gardner wore when she came to let Mitchum know of his wife's rendezvous with Douglas. Gaudy, almost to the degree of clownish, it seemed as though she had another stop to make that night or really thought she should '...look the part,' as Rhett said to Scarlett in Gone with the Wind, as he helped her choose the dress she wore to Ashley's birthday party. When Mitchum opens the door and she walks in he must've first thought she was Emmet Kelly wearing a torpedo bra (forgive me, Ava). One entire layer of pancake could have been removed in that lighting. Still loved the flick - especially the costumes.

Like Saratoga Trunk another New Orleans set Melodrama this flick has a good looking star couple, with the heroine just having a flavoring of "exotic Blood". But at least there is the hint of an action sequence in that Warner Bros. misstep,this flick makes you wish some pirates, Redcoats, Union cavalry on a rampage were in this one to wake it up.

Romantic melodrama hung with Spanish moss, My Forbidden Past is so much gaudy claptrap. Taking several actors who made their names in the hot crucible of film noir and plunking them into a tired, costumed period-piece showed perverse ingenuity. The plot involves duplicitous machinations within a love...trapezoid?...in New Orleans at some vague juncture between the Surrender at Appomatox and the Guns of August, 1914.Both Robert Mitchum and Ava Gardner, as the "good" lovers, flail around like fish out of water; the best performances come from the skunks: Melvyn Douglas, Lucile Watson and, especially, Janis Carter, as Gardner's rival (and in the same league of tough cookies; she has been called, from her relative few appearances, the "poor man's Barbara Stanwyck").The most baffling part of the movie concerns Gardner's deceased grandmother, whose name MUST NOT BE UTTERED! Mixed blood? It's just left that she was a "notorious" woman -- what, a voodoo priestess? Her life story sounds like better watching than these silly 70 minutes.