Sunday with Barbara Stanwyck

“The Purchase Price” showcases the star as a mail-order bride in North Dakota

This movie is, by my reckoning, misunderstood by critics. I’ve seen it twice. Both times, I was enveloped by the transformation of the main character, Joan, played by Barbara Stanwyck. It’s an interesting film on its merits, however, under the direction of William Wellman, the pre-production code motion picture takes on additional layers. Besides Joan, there’s the male lead, Jim (George Brent). Jim is a poor but strong, diligent and handsome farmer in North Dakota. Joan is his mail-order bride.

The couple are the point of the story. In a series of plot contrivances, Joan escapes a gangster to Canada and takes a train to the northwest American plains to meet a man she knows only by a photograph of him on a horse. As Joan, Stanwyck sings in movies for the first time — the torch tune “Take Me Away” — and the actress was burned on both legs after refusing a stunt double for a scene in which she fights to extinguish flames in a blazing wheat field fire. Stanwyck had to be hospitalized (she …