The Purchase Price is a 1932 pre-Code American romantic drama film directed by William Wellman and starring Barbara Stanwyck, George Brent and Lyle Talbot.

Adapted from the novel The Mud Lark by Arthur Stringer, with a screenplay by Robert Lord, the film is about an attractive nightclub singer who leaves her criminal boyfriend and becomes the mail-order bride of a humble farmer.

Joan Gordon, a New York torch singer who has been performing since age 15, has left her wealthy criminal boyfriend Eddie Fields for upstanding citizen Don Leslie.

Unwilling to return to him, she trades places with her hotel's maid Emily, who had used Joan's picture when corresponding with a North Dakota farmer in search of a mail-order bride.

Offering the maid $100 for the farmer's address, Joan sets out to become the wife of Jim Gilson, with only a vague idea of all the hardships of farm life during the height of the Great Depression.

The reviewer added: "Miss Stanwyck continues to exercise her uncanny ability to make the most phony heroines seem like human beings.

"[1] Time magazine wrote: "The picture hews close to the line of probability ... [R]are until recently has been the cinema heroine who preferred the stupid poor man to the bright city fellow.

In addition to four other Wellman pre-Code films, it was released on DVD as part of Turner Classic Movies's 2009 Forbidden Hollywood, Vol.