This George Cukor film is a creaky soap-opera from a stage play and shows its stage origins throughout with melodramatic, florid dialog and overbearingly anguished performances from BILLIE BURKE (in a rare dramatic role) and JOHN BARRYMORE, who at least doesn't appear to be reading cue cards yet. He puts heartfelt sympathy into the role of a man returning from an insane asylum who finds that his wife is in love with another man and only has pity for him--but not love.
Only when he realizes that it's useless to come between his wife (who tells him she has divorced him) and her new love, does he face the truth. He gets helpful support from his loving daughter Sidney (KATHARINE HEPBURN in her film debut) and, in fact, shares a final tender scene at the piano with his daughter playing the lovely theme Max Steiner wrote for the film.
But it's hopelessly dated in every way--and even Hepburn goes overboard with the quivering lower lip and stage acting techniques which she gradually refined for the camera. The only natural performer (by today's standards) is David MANNERS as the young man earnestly in love with Hepburn and rebuffed by her after she's told by HENRY STEPHENSON that she may have inherited the insanity gene from her father.
At a brisk seventy minutes of running time, it's still seems slow and labored and totally unreal, no matter how hard the cast tries.
Only when he realizes that it's useless to come between his wife (who tells him she has divorced him) and her new love, does he face the truth. He gets helpful support from his loving daughter Sidney (KATHARINE HEPBURN in her film debut) and, in fact, shares a final tender scene at the piano with his daughter playing the lovely theme Max Steiner wrote for the film.
But it's hopelessly dated in every way--and even Hepburn goes overboard with the quivering lower lip and stage acting techniques which she gradually refined for the camera. The only natural performer (by today's standards) is David MANNERS as the young man earnestly in love with Hepburn and rebuffed by her after she's told by HENRY STEPHENSON that she may have inherited the insanity gene from her father.
At a brisk seventy minutes of running time, it's still seems slow and labored and totally unreal, no matter how hard the cast tries.