Being the third wife featured, we see enough of Lora Mae's caustic personality to get a fix on her and her husband Porter and watching her reacting to snappy repartee around her. Lora Mae is the most detached, deliberate, and defensive.
Lora Mae's character is as hard as nails as she sets up the viewer to expect a gold-digging woman. The arm-candy on a fat cat. But is there more to her? Lora Mae is beautiful with a sly smile and sharp tongue. She's the cat who has caught the canary and knows the secrets; she's the first to learn that we will not be seeing Addie Ross. Lora Mae is more cynical than Rita and more out of place in the social strata than Deborah--and yet neither bothers Lora Mae. Lora Mae is ambitous but with different goals than either of her pals. Rita has ambition for a career, Deborah has ambition for children, and Lora Mae has ambition for...... what, really? She is a woman of subtext and codewords. While we see that Rita and George Phipps have a fight one night, Lora Mae and Porter seem to have a Cold War.
From the first moment (one hour into the movie) when Lora Mae says defensively, "I've got everything I want." --we want to know how has she become like this?
Lora Mae then hears narrator Addie Ross, for Addie asks in narration: "Maybe you haven't got everything you wanted after all."
The flashback for Lora Mae goes back years, even before Deborah Bishop's marriage to Brad. It starts for Lora Mae on the other side of the tracks (literally). We find the former Lora Mae Finney and her mother, Ma Finney (Connie Gilchrist) and her sister, Babe (Barbara Lawarence). Their old homestead rattles and shakes almost to a shambles with every passing train, which occurs on regular basis. The house's pride and joy is a new refrigerator, although how it got into the house is a minor unknown. It is all fine movie-making giving us deep view at Lora Mae's history and done in under five minutes! Great use of "showing the story."
In terms of character, I find Lora Mae the most fascinating. Lora Mae is very self-protective; that's her weakness. She meets her match in normal red-blooded male Porter Hollingsway (Paul Douglas). He is obviously attracted to her, yet he has reasons to be gunshy of romance himself.
The flashback is Lora Mae having her first date with Mr. Porter Hollingsway, the big man in town and her boss at the Department Store he owns. Their date is a study in the politeness of being someone else and getting something other than dinner and conversation. Both are observant and calculating on each other. They are after different goals. We can't be certain if Lora Mae is being direct or pretending to put Porter off. But she lures him back, using beauty and wiles and a smile with a hint of promise.
Lora Mae and Porter make a "good deal" for each other and get married. Yet it seems they never speak warmly to each other about how they they feel. It is a relationship that is wrapped in subtext and code.
Lora Mae's defensiveness can be her undoing. It's her mother and reality that finally brings her to awakening that risk in love is worth more than making a "good deal"
In the romantic movie it is when somebody finally speaks the truth. The guard comes down. The lover's hearts are revealed. In the case of Porter and Lora Mae are we going to know if they get what they've really wanted?
Will Addie Ross get what she wanted after all?