Another of King Vidor's hot-house melodramas about another girl from the wrong side of the tracks who marries on the rebound while still carrying the torch for the bad apple who threw her over in the first place. Jennifer Jones is "Ruby Gentry", pouting and pushing her ample bosom in the faces of all comers, Charlton Heston is the heel she pines after and Karl Malden is the nice, if somewhat overly jealous, widower she marries.
It's just the kind of sow's ear that Vidor was expert in turning into a silk purse; style oozes from every frame and both Jones and Malden are excellent. Even Heston, playing a bad boy for a change, passes muster. Of course, hysteria is never far from the surface and at just eighty-two minutes there's a lot of plot to cram in. What might have been just tawdry in the hands of a lesser director here becomes something of an American tragedy.
It's just the kind of sow's ear that Vidor was expert in turning into a silk purse; style oozes from every frame and both Jones and Malden are excellent. Even Heston, playing a bad boy for a change, passes muster. Of course, hysteria is never far from the surface and at just eighty-two minutes there's a lot of plot to cram in. What might have been just tawdry in the hands of a lesser director here becomes something of an American tragedy.