feature: PRELUDE TO HAPPINESS

TRAILER: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpvqOZ40otQ A man who claimed to be the writer and producer of PRELUDE TO HAPPINESS gave me this tape in 1996; his name was Jack Naismith, and his grandfather invented basketball (James Naismith, 1891). Jack went to Vietnam a surgeon and came back too rattled to operate, he told me, so he started fitting amputees with artificial limbs... and that's how Jack met Rose Petra (the eventual star of PRELUDE) and fell in love. The film's story was their story, he said - the beautiful young woman who loses a leg and the brilliant young doctor who saws it off; the furious, pinch-faced fiance; and the snobbish old-money family who, unlike Rose, have something against her remaining leg. Jack showed me a thick album chronicling their love affair, photo after photo of Rose posing scantily uni-legged on fountains, in doorways, on horseback... Many years later, after Jack had taken his own life, his family said that all of the above was nonsense: Jack was never a surgeon, and he had nothing to do with PRELUDE TO HAPPINESS. But if that's true - where did Jack get all those snapshots of Rose Petra? And who wrote PRELUDE TO HAPPINESS? Frankly, I'm stumped.