Those who have read Howard Spring's novel of the same name in 1938 no doubt will feel, after seeing this picture, that it has failed to recapture the strength of the book. For Madeleine Carroll and Brian Aherne hardly go below the surface to create characters who could be the object or the source of any emotion. They pass ineffectively through the story of a novelist. Aherne, finding himself and his worthless son, Louis Hayward, in love with the same painter, Carroll. That the picture suffers from the elimination of certain scenes of the book that might remove the fireless acting is unfortunate, but the result is a drawnout tale of unhappy lives and unhappy children. It is relieved only in the warm and heart-felt showing by Henry Hull and Laraine Day as father-and-daughter friends of the family sucked into the web of filial and matrimonial complications. Continuity of effect and depth of performance are not conspicuous by their presence in the picture.
Read more in News
LaCroix to Be Manager of '42 Nine
