Ella-May O'Brien
Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.
EyeAskance
Attractive, soon-to-be-married Susan is lucky to survive an automobile accident, though one of her legs is lost. Will her coldblooded, creepy fiancée decide against spending his life with an amputee and call off their wedding? Will it be the pain and consternation of a broken heart which truly cripples her? Will the surgeon who loves Susan choose her over the bitch he's engaged to? Will Susan wear a variety of garments which fully expose her reduced limb?PRELUDE TO HAPPINESS plays like a bargain basement Sirkian soap-drama spiked with a stiff three count shot of rose-watered acrotomophilia (amputee fetishism). This is a completely straight-faced project, its soberness straining to palliate and/or dignify the true exploitive nature of the material. Capricious conations of this type often come in strange flavors...and strange, indeed, this picture is.Rose Petra(a real-life amputee) is an appealing ingénue who manages to bring an unexpected incisiveness to her character. The rest of the cast are underwhelming, however, and at times downright dreadful. A visibly neophytic production in every technical aspect, it's nonetheless fairly entertaining in ways which are legitimate as well as incidental. At the end of the day, PRELUDE TO HAPPINESS is an anomalous little 'force majeure' which might have appeal to viewers other than peg-leg devotees and the extreme-cinema coterie. Delimited provisions have precluded the broad-range notoriety this 24-karate W*T*F wonder so nobly deserves, and whomever is responsible for shielding it from the kiss of death has my gratitude...it was reputedly in urgent jeopardy of being "lost" until somewhat recently. A world without PRELUDE TO HAPPINESS would be like an ice-cream sundae without anchovies...unimaginable.5.5/10
