Borrowing the plot of Fannie Hurst's novel Back Street, the classic weepie about a key woman living in secret devotion to a married man, Capra whipped up a story called Forbidden, which reached the screen seven months before Universal's adaptation of Back Street. Derivative though Capra's film was, and usually dismissed as an impersonal genre piece, it was in fact replete with covert autobiographical overtones referring not only to Barbara Stanwyck (with whom the director was romantically involved at the time) but also to the other women in his life, including his future wife, Lucille “Lu” Warner Reyburn, from whom Capra borrows the name of Stanwyck's character, Lulu. Forbidden was a strangely incongruent grab bag of other Capra obsessions, straddling the genres of the soap opera, the newspaper melodrama, and the political exposé. Stanwyck deepens this rickety but fascinating concoction with a performance of utter emotional credibility and, at times, startling intensity, especially in the film's climactic scene.