Come Back, Little Sheba is a 1952 drama film, also put on show in theatres as a play, which tells us the story of a loveless marriage of a chiropractor and a housewife, made by Paramount Pictures. The couple’s marriage is swayed when a young woman rents a room in their house. The movie stars Burt Lancaster as Doc Delaney, Shirley Booth as Lola Delaney, Terry Moore as Marie and Richard Jaeckel as Turk.
The shotgun marriage took place among Lola and Doc 25 years ago. At that time, Doc just dropped out of a medical school. The pregnancy, which caused a hasty marriage, ended in a miscarriage. While the lost, heartbroken couple tried to find solace, Doc ends up escaping through alcohol and Lora finds little solace in housewifery which leads her to a needful dependency.
Marie Buckholder, a college art student, is in search of a place to live and answers a newspaper ad regarding a room to rent in the home of Doc and Lola Delaney. The co-ed boarder Marie has two men in her sphere that she is seeing. Turk is the sexy hunk while Bruce is a successful and wealthy boyfriend back home whom she is going to marry. The three young characters bring youthful pull to the story and film.
While, the nervous Doc, a recovering alcoholic, shows a change resistant nature and worries that new lodger might disturb the steadiness of their life, Lola is also trying to live her life through the adventures of new lodger later. When Marie decides to take the room, Delaney couple is fond of her as if she were their daughter, or more symbolically, their missing dog, Little Sheba. Marie becomes the symbol of what might have been the couple’s life like. The long lost pet, Little Sheba, represents that good times from the past when Lola had her youthful looks and Doc was a medical student with a promising future in front of him.
Marie represents the youth and opportunity for Doc that he had sacrificed in past. He is also jealous of Marie and Turk. He tries to disguise his desire to flirt with her by paternalism, but the realization that she is not as he opined of her sends him back to the bottle. Doc’s relapse was predicted and feared by Lola. The couple happily approves when Marie suddenly marries Bruce.
As much as Marie and Turk’s togetherness relapses Doc, Lola likes to watch the young couple’s romantic couplings, indirectly feeding her own desires. She is actually longing for her own lost beauty and youth, and listens to a radio program, “Taboo” which assures to its lonely listeners of covert seductions. Lola once tries to indulge in some physical fantasy but she’s guilt-stricken and startled by Doc’s unexpected return from work.
Lola is a clear picture of lonely housewives chained to wearisome routines. She doesn’t try to hide her sadness behind the busyness of domestic work rather she refuses to work in her melancholy. There’s so salvation for Lola; she’s dependent with no means and no skills, terrorized in her own home, and there’s no way to escape. Sheba is the long lost dog, a hope maybe, she hopelessly calls for.
