Ray Schmidt, the protagonist of John M. Stahl’s Back Street (1932), ought to know better. As the film opens, Ray, played by Irene Dunne, is waltzing the floor of a Bavarian beer garden in the American Midwest, an admiring onlooker describing her as “the toniest girl in Cincinnati.” This scene establishes two things: Ray’s status as coveted arm candy for the traveling salesmen passing through the turn-of-the-century Ohio River town, and Ray’s graceful ability to keep these boys at bay with their groping, whispered dirty jokes, and invitations to the nearest hotel. (This type of glad-handing ne’er-do-well is represented in Dawn Powell’s novels Big Night and My Home is Far Away, which draw on memories of her own Ohio girlhood, and her shiftless salesman father.) Ray knows just who these blithe, blustery salesmen are and how they operate, and she takes them at face value, trading an easy, fluting laugh and demure smile for a date and a dance and a couple steins of beer. And then one day, after years of staying on her guard, she surrenders her closely guarded maidenhead to Walter (John Boles), a fellow a little younger and more polished than the average run of salesman, but just a little. She ought to know better, but knowledge only takes you so far.

It’s not that this Walter is a bad sort, really; in fact, you almost wish he had the backbone to be a proper cad and bounder. Instead he’s simply oblivious and self-regarding and swell-headed, in the way that a native-born white middle-class American male go-getter in late Victorian times was given every encouragement to be by society. Stahl had a penchant for using Boles, a waxily handsome light tenor with a brisk, ingratiating manner, to play charmers whose suavity only half-disguises a deeper shiftlessness or inconsequentiality—see for example Stahl’s Seed (1931), in which aspiring novelist Boles drops his wife and five children in order to take up with an old flame, or Stahl’s Only Yesterday (1933), drawing from the same Stefan Zweig short story which would be adapted into Max Ophüls’s Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), in which Boles loves and leaves poor Margaret Sullavan.

Walter, to his credit, seems genuinely to care for Ray, though he expresses his affection with a stock of honeyed phrases—“the air’s like wine” and so forth—belonging to a time and place when the height of culture was a moist-eyed acquaintance with the poetry of James Whitcomb Riley, their color and perfume now faded like lilacs pressed in an ancient book of keepsakes. When he first meets her he’s on a trip down from Hamilton, about 20 miles north of Cincinnati, in town to pay court to the daughter of one of the city’s first families, a friend from childhood to whom he’s engaged. After he and Ray duck away from a rain shower to (implicit) erotic consummation, however, Walter to all appearances is prepared to call off his engagement, but for the fact that Ray misses a planned rendezvous with her lover at the band shell in Eden Park. (Incidentally, later identified as the place where Jack Lemmon’s character in Billy Wilder’s 1960 The Apartment had made a failed suicide attempt.)

Hamilton, known today principally as a meth hotspot and the birthplace of porn star Bonnie Rotten, would have been a manufacturing boomtown in the first years of the 19th century—a title card vaguely sets the opening of Back Street in “the good old days before the Eighteenth Amendment,” while references to Henry Ford as an upstart businessman place these scenes around that time. It was also the hometown of author Fannie Hurst, whose 1931 bestseller of the same name was adapted from by Gladys Lehman and Lynn Starling, with uncredited punch-ups courtesy Gene Fowler and Ben Hecht. Hurst’s mass appeal to a largely female readership had elevated her to celebrity status in the years after World War I, and that celebrity was still very much in place when Stahl’s film was made, which is why its opening credits are presented as the cover and front matter of a book, a reassurance to audiences of the movie’s respectable literary pedigree.

Walter is Jewish in Hurst’s novel, something excised from Stahl’s film, which gives the character the vaguely Teutonic surname of Saxel. Instead of the problem of religious incompatibility, Stahl’s Back Street emphasizes the role that social class plays in matchmaking in an America where everyone is forever busy trying to overtake everyone else on the social ladder. Even the humble Schmidt home isn’t entirely free of snobbery. Ray’s father, played by the Saxony-born character actor Paul Weigel, is a shopkeeper who runs a little dresses and notions concern, a character representative of the thousands of Germans who kept pouring into Cincinnati in droves for almost a century after 1848, in such numbers that the neighborhood that they populated north of downtown, bordered by the industrial Mill Creek, became known as “Over-the-Rhine.” He doesn’t mind his daughter’s trips to the old neighborhood, but Ray’s unmistakably native-born stepmother, portrayed by the sturdy Ma Joad of John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), Missourian Jane Darwell, refers with haughty disdain to Ray’s merrymaking trips to Over-the-Rhine, and one may see in her objection a recoil from the taint of foreignness, a desire to distance the family from oom-pah brass and the clinging scent of sauerkraut.

As for that Saxels, Walter makes it quite plain to Ray that his mother is the architect of his engagement, and one possible reason for her avid commitment to her son’s making this particular match becomes evident in the film’s second act, when Ray and Walter, both living in New York City some years after their botched meeting in Eden Park, run into one another on Wall Street, seen under a feathery soundstage snowfall. (As with the spring shower that throws Ray into Walter’s arms in Cincinnati, or the Long Island hurricane in his 1939 When Tomorrow Comes, Stahl does magical things with inclement weather.) Walter, his lip now graced by a sprig of moustache, is well on his way to becoming a big man—this thanks in no small part to family connections at his firm made through his canny marriage. He has enough money to pay his own way now, and even to keep a mistress tucked off in a comfortable apartment, and very soon Ray, still smitten, has quit her job to become that mistress, waiting on Walter’s beck and call.