The basic plot elements are more or less the same as the last time this story was filmed, starring Barbara Stanwyck, in 1937. A poor but plucky mother has a daughter out of wedlock, proudly refuses financial aid from the rich man who is the father, and raises the girl on her own. Mother and daughter love each other, but the day comes when the mother - a former barmaid, now selling cosmetics door to door - realizes that the father and his sophisticated fiancee can give the girl (now college age) the advantages she needs. So the mother gives away her daughter - all but drives her away - and the ending is pure melodrama.
"Audiences came to sneer and stayed to weep," film historian Leslie Halliwell said of the 1937 version. They're likely to do the same thing this time. Every charge you can make against this movie is probably true - it's cornball, manipulative, unlikely, sentimental and shameless. But once the lights go down and the performances begin, none of those things really matter, because this "Stella" has a quality that many more sophisticated films lack: It makes us really care about its characters.
Bette Midler and Trini Alvarado play the mother and daughter as well as I can imagine them being played, with style and life. They don't put on long faces and march through the gloom. Midler must have played around with a lot of walks and a lot of accents - she must have experimented with attitudes and personal styles - before she hit on the right note for Stella. She's a tough broad who, as the movie opens in 1969, tends bar for a living and who has even been known to climb up on the bar when someone plays "The Stripper" on the jukebox. She's not educated, but she's smart and funny, and has a determined, independent attitude toward life.
The bar is a working-class, shot-and-beer joint. One night a slick customer comes in wearing a cashmere sweater and a nice smile.
He likes the way she had fun when she dances. Against her better judgment, they have an affair, she gets pregnant, he halfway offers to marry her, she says nothing doing, and the rest of the movie is about how she raises the kid, named Jenny, on her own. The father (Stephen Collins) stays in the picture, however, because he comes to love his daughter. So does his financee (Marsha Mason). And there is the steady guy in Stella's life, a bartender named Ed (John Goodman) who is a pal, not a lover, and sticks with her through her problems while piling up a lot of his own.
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