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Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

Kansas girl makes a splash in New York City as a print model, but her love affair with a married man may ruin her. From the era where independent career girls were only ambitious until a man entered the picture, this "woman's movie" is naive and rather unconvincing, though it is seldom soft; the knowing dialogue has a sharp, bitter edge, and the performances are solid, making it a cut above the usual soap opera. Isobel Lennart's screenplay is dotted with cutting little truths--too many, perhaps; often, the greedy masochism is underlined with a moral conscience (and tinkling piano keys) which turns the whole thing into a heavy-breathing melodrama for sufferers on the high road. Lana Turner does a lot of striding up and down, and she seems too seasoned to be a novice in the film's opening scenes, but her desperate gaiety is touching. Ray Milland does his usual colorless nice-guy turn, but Ann Dvorak is startling playing an over-the-hill model and Margaret Phillips (as Milland's wife--an invalid who beams with sanity and understanding like a saint) is excellent in the film's big scene, where the two women meet. Not an important picture, nor a provocative one, but a star-vehicle that does manage to touch upon some resonant truths about women, their careers, and their fragile hearts. **1/2 from ****

Tale of a woman coming from Kansas to New York only to hit it big as a model, but unable to capture the man she loved.Lana Turner is that woman and at the beginning of the film, she acts just like that girl who had been discovered in a drug store sipping soda some years before.There is one terrific performance by Ann Dvorak, an aging model, whose life is on the skids. Dvorak represents what can happen to women as they get older and are not able to cope with the changes that it brings. Miss Dvorak is the embodiment of that discontented woman, bitter and not knowing what else life will bring her. Unfortunately, her appearance in the film is a brief one, as she commits suicide.The rest of the story is devoted to Turner falling in love with Ray Milland, a wealthy married man whose wife is wheel-chair bound due to a car accident that he caused.When love blossoms between the two, Turner becomes hard-boiled in her intentions to tell the wife of what is going on. Of course, kindness and reality set in when Turner sees how dependent the wife is.Louis Calhern is very good as the man about town with a heart and Barry Sullivan is quite adequate as a gigolo, who knows what life can be all about.

A Life Of Her Own casts Lana Turner as a small town girl who with her beauty goes to New York for a career as a model. She's got the looks, but has she the character for the profession? She reports some six months after the agency that Tom Ewell runs called for her. It was a simple matter of economics, Lana just didn't have the train fare from Kansas. But very much like Lana Turner in real life, discovered in Schwab's Drugstore in Hollywood because of her beauty and made a film star, Turner becomes a success in the modeling profession.Anything's better than life in Kansas and Turner's after more than a career. She meets Ray Milland who is a mine owner from Montana back east to raise some money with the help of lawyer Louis Calhern. Of course the inevitable happens as it usually does in these films, but the problem is Milland is slightly married to Margaret Phillips.Here's where the film gets real sudsy. Phillips is a paraplegic as a result of an automobile accident. The subject is rather delicately handled with the Code still in place, but the clear inference is that Milland is not enjoying any kind of sex life any more. So he's more than willing to get involved with Turner.The Code parameters both limit how the subject is handled and the inevitable outcome of the film which I won't reveal. George Cukor directed A Life Of Her Own and the film is definitely missing his usual flair for 'women's' pictures. And the film is clearly Lana's with the rest of the cast in support.Some younger players at MGM like Jean Hagen and Phyllis Kirk play other models, but Ann Dvorak in one of her last films has a couple of scenes as an older woman trying to make a comeback in a profession that lives and dies on youth. She only has a couple of scenes, but they've got some real bite to them. I wish we had a lot more of her in the film.A Life Of Her Own is not one of the better films for Cukor, Turner, or Milland, but it's entertaining enough given the Code parameters it was made under.

Lana Turner goes into the modeling world hoping to get discovered. Along the way, she meets Ray Milland, who's a married man, and of course they start having feelings for each other. Ann Dvorak (from Paul Muni's "Scarface") is great in a supporting role. In fact, some would say she steals the show, because the viewer thinks of her even when she's not on the screen, due to circumstances I'm not going into. Barry Sullivan, who was frequent costar of Lana's, is on hand with his shoulder for Lana to cry on.For such an unknown movie of Lana's, one would think is just a hum-drum black-and-white movie. But, "A Life of Her Own" is a very well-written and insightful film which provides a mature approach to a woman's life at an older age, who is trying to find herself and what she really wants out of life, and what she doesn't want.An added plus which most reviewers have already alluded to, is the great music score to this film. It makes Ray and Lana's scenes feel very intimate. But when reality hits and she meets the wheelchair-bound wife. it does get rather depressing and downbeat. But the ending is very soothing, as she "is herself" with Barry and visits the view one more time of Ann Dvorak's old apartment building and where she doesn't want to wind up. It's a shame to think only Lana fans would be attracted to this film. It's one for all those who want something intelligent and for people, who though older and not quite settled, are still yearning for "a life of their own."