The Purchase Price

This offbeat melodrama was directed by the iconoclastic William A. Wellman and stars Barbara Stanwyck as Joan Gordon, a hardboiled nightclub singer on the lam who becomes a farmer's mail-order bride. After Joan gets fed up being the kept woman of her married boss, bootlegger Ed Fields (Lyle Talbot), she flees New York City and ends up in North Dakota as the mail-order bride of wheat farmer Jim Gilson (George Brent). The film features one of the weirdest wedding ceremonies ever shot, and Stanwyck's rendition of "Take Me Away" marks the first time she sang on screen.